The new German Government calls for a European ban on biometric mass monitoring, 83% of Europeans would be opposed to sharing data on their faces

According to a survey by the Fundamental Rights Agency, 83% of Europeans are against sharing their facial data with the authorities and 94% against sharing it with private entities. However, today we are witnessing a proliferation of the adoption of biometric mass surveillance by the governments of certain countries, including the countries of the European Union. On November 24, the new German government called for a European ban on biometric mass surveillance.Note that biometrics is the science that focuses on the analysis of the physical or behavioral characteristics specific to each individual. By mass biometric surveillance, we mean facial recognition, but also the analysis of emotions and behaviors by video surveillance, automated predictions based on physical characteristics, automated biometric analysis of our profiles on social networks, the automatic analysis of our voices and our behavior.Biometric mass surveillance uses automatic digital technologies by artificial intelligence for the recognition of physical or behavioral characteristics of people present in public places, for the purposes of identification or prevention of risks. Biometrics simply means "measurement of the human body". subject to strict conditions of necessity and proportionality. A growing number of countries are following China in deploying artificial intelligence to track citizens, according to a report by a research group released Tuesday. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (a nongovernmental organization and global think tank dedicated to fostering interstate cooperation and advancing U.S. interests internationally), at least 75 countries are actively using AI tools such as facial recognition for surveillance. The index of countries where some form of AI surveillance is used includes liberal democracies such as the United States and France, as well as more autocratic regimes. “Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is rapidly proliferating in the whole world. Startling developments continue to emerge, from early deepfake videos that blur the line between truth and lies, to advanced algorithms that can beat the best players in the world. Companies are harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence to improve analytical processing. City officials are using AI to monitor traffic jams and monitor smart energy meters. Yet a growing number of states are deploying advanced AI-enabled surveillance tools to control, monitor, and track citizens to achieve a variety of policy goals (some legal, some violating human rights). man and many of them are in a slippery slope),” the report says. According to a civil society initiative group to ban biometric mass surveillance practices, there is evidence that uses of mass biometric surveillance in EU Member States and by EU agencies have led to breaches of EU data protection law, and unduly restricted the rights of individuals, including their privacy, right to freedom of expression, their right to protest and not to be discriminated against. Germany's government coalition, which has just reached an agreement, has called for a Europe-wide ban on public facial recognition and other forms of biometric surveillance. This echoes the central demands of the Reclaim Your Face campaign that EDRi has co-led since 2020, through which more than 65 civil society groups call on the EU and their national governments to ban mass surveillance of biometric data. .Germany's new government has announced its long-awaited coalition agreement, including the strongest commitments seen so far in Europe to "exclude...biometric recognition in public". They also called for the rejection of full CCTV and the use of biometric recordings for surveillance purposes. "It is a great success for the Reclaim Your Face campaign that our demand for a Europe without biometric surveillance has been included in the coalition agreement of the German government.But that's not enough, said Matthias Marx, spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club. Words must be backed by action now and bound by law.” Since 2020, the Reclaim Your Face coalition has actively lobbied decision makers by uncovering surveillance, publishing research reports, and mobilizing people for a society free of harmful technologies such as facial recognition in publicly accessible spaces. The Reclaim your Face collective is made up of several associations for the defense of freedoms and is led by the European organization EDRi (collective of NGOs, experts, defenders and academics working to defend and advance digital rights in Europe). The Reclaim your Face campaign takes the form of a "European citizens' initiative", i.e. an institutional petition aimed at collecting one million signatures in several countries of the European Union to ask the Commission to prohibit mass biometric surveillance practices. This mobilization responds to the risk of permanent and invisible surveillance of the public space, presuming each person as potentially suspect and reducing our bodies to a function of constant tracers then responsible for the disappearance of anonymity in the public space. movement led by EDRi members Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Digitale Gesellschaft and Digitalcourage, has been particularly active, counting more than 16 organizations. They have organized more than 14 events and participated in social media stunts, Twitter storms, as well as peaceful protests offline. Nearly 30,000 German citizens have signed the campaign's European Citizens' Initiative, proving that citizen-led actions can create meaningful change. According to Chaos Computer Club spokesperson Matthias Marx, it's a great achievement for the Reclaim Your Face movement that the demand for a biometric-free Europe was included in the coalition agreement of the German government. "But that's not enough," he said. Words must be backed by actions now and bound by law.” Importantly, this new statement comes a week before the Council of the European Union (the group of ministers and ambassadors of EU member states EU) defines its first position on the future European law on artificial intelligence. Remote biometric identification, discriminatory biometric categorization and emotion recognition were hot topics in the negotiations. . Given the strong opposition to the digitization of our faces and bodies, we expect governments to reject mass biometric surveillance practices that treat every person as a potential criminal, invade our privacy on a large scale and amplify discrimination,” underlined Konstantin Macher of digitalcourage. European law”. The announcement lends further support to European players calling for a full ban in Europe, including the European Data Protection Board and European Supervisor, the European Parliament and the governments of several EU countries. that facial recognition itself is not as dangerous as one might think, the Reclaim Your Face movement believes and states that "facial recognition can and will be used against all of us by governments and corporations on the basis of who we are and what we look like." "I'm not too worried about companies using CCTV because it's well managed and gets erased unseen unless something happens , says a user. I also have no fear that the police will use this CCTV footage to investigate a crime. The number of times I see people posting photos of public places on Facebook is shocking... It's the automation that worries me. “What worries me the most is when things like image recognition come into play. A company can't monitor me by paying someone to sift through CCTV footage. But she can monitor me using automation to process everything,”says the Internet user, citizens of the United Kingdom.Last month, the European Parliament voted in favor of a total ban on biometric mass surveillance by law enforcement agencies. MEPs said EU lawmakers should permanently ban automated people recognition in public spaces, saying citizens should only be monitored when they are suspected of a crime. Parliament also called for a ban on the use of private facial recognition databases like the controversial AI system created by US startup Clearview (also already used by some police forces in Europe) and said that predictive policing based on behavioral data should also be prohibited. MEPs also want to ban social rating systems that seek to rate the trustworthiness of citizens based on their behavior or personality.Source: Reclaim Your FaceAnd you? What do you think of this request of the new German government to the EU? Are you for or against biometrics mass surveillance?See also: More and more countries are emulating China's example by deploying AI to track citizens, according to a report The European Parliament has voted Call for outright ban on biometric mass surveillance by law enforcement the regulations to overcome it India is considering a huge facial recognition program comparable to that of China,Germany's new government calls for EU ban of biometric mass surveillance, 83% of Europeans would be opposed to sharing their facial data

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