AI OK but Biometrics Not

A small article in the news section of March’s ID & Secure Document News noted that at the same time as European Union lawmakers are on track to ban the use of remote biometric surveillance for general law enforcement purposes, France had approved the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor public spaces for suspicious behaviour during the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Following that, the Constitutional Council, the highest constitutional authority in France, scrutinised the provisions of the law and approved the use of algorithmic processing of video feeds during the Olympics but restricted the system from being used to collect biometric data.

The provisions that the government sought to improve safety at the Olympics are, in effect, an extension of a previous article that allowed for ‘images collected by means of a video protection system or cameras installed on aircraft to be subject to algorithmic processing in order to detect and report certain events.’