Thank fuck. Now kill Chat Control.
I never want to see this here, ever. The fact that anyone wants mass facial recognition is disturbing.
When you find out who is asking for it, it makes more sense.
And becomes even more scary.
Ignorant person here: who is asking?
It focused on two amendments posted by EPP, allowing in principle facial recognition on public spaces for law enforcement purposes.
The rich.
What is an MEP?
Member of the European Parliament.
The European Parliament is an important forum for political debate and decision-making at the EU level. The Members of the European Parliament are directly elected by voters in all Member States to represent people’s interests with regard to EU law-making and to make sure other EU institutions are working democratically.
Source: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/about-parliament/en
Just don’t ask me what other branches and divisions the EU government has 😅 I’m hilariously badly informed on how the system actually works, forgot all my civics lessons from 20+ years ago
Ah thank you for helping this uncultured American understand.
You’re welcome. And hey, I’m the one who should be feeling uncultured: I seriously can’t remember how the EU works beyond some very rudimentary basics (there’s a Parliament and a Commission, and they do, uh… stuff) and I’m Finnish. We’ve been in the EU for almost 30 years and I supposedly learned this shit in middle school when we joined
To be fair, no one actually knows how the EU works.
Biggest problem with the union, easy to criticize it because no one knows how to counter the criticism. And usually the people who criticize it don’t understand the union either
Member of European Parliament. It’s somewhat analogous to a US House member.
I went to a gas station that had facial recognition cameras. They cited theft, but also their “legitimate interest”, using website cookie language - only there was no easily apparent way to object to their legitimate interest.
What we really need is legislation. The law needs to recognise that businesses cannot just steal data from people for free for their own profits - not to mention exploiting that data against the data subject.
If you build and sell a car, you have to pay for the nuts and bolts. You can’t just take them and say “well, you wouldn’t know how to build a car, and they only cost a tiny, tiny amount, so we don’t need to pay you.”
Personal data has value. So much value, the businesses that focus on collecting it are some of the wealthiest in the world. We are all being robbed.
Cries in UK where AI has already been used to ensure no such restrictions apply here.
It sounds like a good step, but I’m sad it seems to only specify “AI-Powered”. We’ve had effective methods of bulk facial recognition for years without “AI”. Not AS effective, maybe, but definitely effective enough. Also, I didn’t see in the linked article - did they define “AI” well? I guess I feel like it would be easy to bypass that definition.
It’s the article inserting buzzwords. The EU banned “the use of real-time biometrics in public spaces”.
You can still run facial recognition on specific pictures or video that has the perp of a crime on it, you just can’t do it to everyone all the time.
Ah, that’s very helpful context, thank you! Makes me significantly more excited about this
The EU has a general ban on “AI” or any sort of automation making decisions about people who are not aware of the exact criteria those decisions are made about.
That for example spares us from a lot of automatic CV screening as well as law enforcement profiling with AI tools. We do it mostly the old-school way of just having racist / classist cops.
Lucky the UK decided to leave. They have one of the largest public facial recognition surveillance networks.
I guess they get their sovereignty. I doubt the UK alone would have been able to sway this, and they would have had to dismantle their stuff if they didn’t get another exemption.
It’s a shame, it helps to uphold the law against muggers and other anti-social behaviour.
The EU has become increasingly anti-tech recently - with the DSA, and proposed Chat Control act, AI act, etc. - it’s a shame to see.
The EU is not anti-tech, it’s anti US Big Tech. The DMA is way overdue, the AI act actually follows existing precedent and is also only protecting people. Companies and foreign governments are already exploiting AI against citizens.
Chat control is absolute lunacy though.
