EU: national databases for face recognition

EU police authorities intend to set up a network of national face-recognition databases to cover each Member State, according to internal documents he published the Intercept.

The report by the national police authorities of the 10 EU member states, led by Austria, calls for new EU legislation to enable the creation of an interconnected of data "as soon as possible". The document was circulated among EU officials last November. The Intercept reports that preparatory work for the legislation is already underway.

EU

The report was prepared in the context of the discussions on the addition of face images to its competence Prüm Convention, which currently allows Member States to exchange DNA, fingerprint data and vehicle classification data.

It calls for Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, to play an important role in sharing biometric data with outside the EU, thus creating concerns that the it could also be linked to facial recognition databases in the US.

The United States has been pushing for greater access to EU data since 2004, when the US Embassy in Brussels called for "a relationship that allows us to join forces with EU members in the fight against crime and terrorism through extensive exchanges of all forms of data, including personal data. "

The US already requires exchange countries to adopt data agreements that allow their services to have full access to fingerprint and DNA databases.

Edin Omanovic, team manager Privacy International, told The Intercept that there is a high risk that the system could be used for illegal "politically motivated surveillance".

EU Commissioners have publicly spoken out against the use of face recognition, but recent reports suggest the EU is taking a different approach under the table.

The EU seems to be abandoning its plan to impose a moratorium on the use of face recognition and made almost no mention of the technology in a white paper published on AI last week.

The report published by the Intercept shows that the EU has already paid consultancy firm Deloitte €700.000 to investigate possible changes to the Prüm system. An additional €500.000 has been paid to a consortium of EU public bodies to map the existing uses of facial recognition in criminal investigations with the aim of moving "towards a possible person," according to the Intercept publication.

A separate EU internal report on the exchange of driving license data under Prüm states that "a network of interconnected national registers can be considered as a virtual European register".

The police report announcing the possibility of using interconnected face-recognition databases to identify unknown suspects may sound tempting to the authorities, but the dangers to privacy with such a system are far-reaching, especially considering that to be used in other ways.

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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