From social media tagging on popular platforms like Facebook to a way to unlock your iPhone, facial recognition technology is an increasingly sophisticated tool utilized by nearly every major tech company. It has been a part of law enforcement, building security, and personal computing.
Now, the European Parliament is looking to reign in its use in public spaces.
Earlier this month, the European governing body called on police to pull back on its use of artificial intelligence (AI) services that use facial recognition — a call to limit the application of this tech in mass public surveillance programs.
Members of the parliament voted 377 in favor, 248 opposed on a non-binding resolution that asked European Union lawmakers to ban automatized facial recognition and put in place safeguards for how police forces use this AI, Engadget reports.
What these political leaders are saying is that everyday citizens should only be monitored by AI tools if they are suspected of an actual crime. They are suggesting this shouldn’t be an automatic protocol applied to all people in public spaces.
Engadget’s Kris Holt writes that the big concern centers on what is known as “algorithmic bias” in AI programs. The legislators are pointing to past research that suggests these kinds of facial recognition AI systems tend to misidentify minority ethnic groups, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, and senior citizens at higher rates than other people who are scanned by the same programs.
“Those subject to AI-powered systems must have recourse to remedy,” the resolution reads. They also are calling for a ban of private databases of facial recognition information and what is being called “predictive policing based on behavioral data.”
Holt adds that this latest resolution comes after recommendations earlier this summer from the European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor that said this tech should not use biometric data to classify people into “clusters based on ethnicity, gender, political or sexual orientation.”
Essentially, use of this AI could be mishandled in a discriminatory way, according to the Engadget writer.
What this news further underscores is that the use of ever more sophisticated AI technology will continue to be debated by policymakers and the public alike. As it becomes applied more and more in our daily lives, we will see calls for regulation, and discussions over how best it can be used.