Rights groups seek ban on biometric surveillance

'Biometric mass surveillance brings Internet-style omnipresent tracking to the offline world' say campaigners

A number of privacy and civil rights organisations has come together to call for an EU-wide ban on the use of biometrics for surveillance as officials debate the role of AI in public life.

The groups, which include Reclaim your Face (a coalition of 39 European civil society organisations), the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, Privacy International and 27 other organisations, have launched a petition with the goal of attracting 1 million signatures.

The campaigners are concerned about the rising use of biometric data such as facial imprints that are fed into machine learning algorithms and used to track citizens as they go about their day-to-day business, and how these systems could be abused by repressive regimes.

Biometric data concerning people's bodies and behaviour - such as facial, iris and vein scans and walking gait - can be used to identify and assess individuals and make predictions about them and how they might act.

With the European Commission (EC) currently preparing new legislation on AI, expected to become law later this year, the groups are calling for a ban on the use of such biometric data by law enforcement and other agencies and corporations, arguing that privacy and human dignity are at stake.

"Biometric mass surveillance brings 'Internet-style' omnipresent tracking to the offline world. This would eradicate the few remaining refuges of privacy," said Linus Neumann, a member of the Chaos Computer Club and European Digital Rights (EDRi).

"Governments, police forces and corporations are using recording devices (like CCTV cameras) and facial recognition software to gather our unique biometric data. They track us by using our unique characteristics in order to permanently identify each of us. The blanket capture of every person's biometric data in public spaces like parks, train stations and shops simply for trying to live our lives is biometric mass surveillance," says EDRi on its website.

In a white paper released last year, the EC acknowledges the risks posed by AI that offset potential benefits to healthcare, farming, climate change mitigation, predictive maintenance and security, saying in a white paper, "artificial intelligence entails a number of potential risks, such as opaque decision-making, gender-based or other kinds of discrimination, intrusion in our private lives or being used for criminal purposes"

The groups' campaign can be seen as a way to keep such concerns to the forefront in the minds of the legislators at a time of intense competition in the market for of AI technology.

On the campaign for a ban, Orsolya Reich, senior advocacy officer at the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, said in a statement: "This is about everyone's control over their own future.

"We can already see this happening with the way AI is used to make decisions about us. Biometric mass surveillance will just feed more data from more people into these systems and make these practices even more widespread and harmful."

In the UK, facial recognition technology has been blamed for a number of false arrests and faced calls for it to be banned for police use.

Some US cities have also banned its use by police forces, although reports say it is still in use. Meanwhile, following the death of George Floyd, IBM last year said it would stop selling facial recognition software to US police forces, with Amazon and Microsoft following suit, albeit with room for the decision to be rolled back later.