Public face surveillance is being used by many police forces across Europe to look out for people on their watch-lists; for crowd control at football matches in the UK; and in tracking systems in schools (although so far, attempts to do this in the EU have been stopped). So-called “smart cities” – where technologies that involve identifying people are used to monitor environments with the outward aim of making cities more sustainable – have been implemented to some degree in at least eight EU Member States. Outside the EU, China is reportedly using face surveillance to crack down on the civil liberties of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, and there are mounting fears that Chinese surveillance tech is being exported to the EU and even used to influence UN facial recognition standards. Such issues have brought facial recognition firmly onto the human rights agenda, raising awareness of its (mis)use by both democratic and authoritarian governments.

How is the EU grappling with the facial recognition challenge?

Throughout 2019, a number of EU Member States responded to the threat of facial recognition, although their approaches reveal many inconsistencies. In October 2019, the Swedish Data Protection Authority (DPA) – the national body responsible for personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – approved the use of facial recognition technology for criminal surveillance, finding it legal and legitimate (subject to clarification of how long the biometric data will be kept). Two months earlier, they levied a fine of 20 000 euro for an attempt to use facial recognition in a school. Similarly, the UK DPA has advised police forces to “slow down” due to the volume of unknowns – but have stopped short of calling for a moratorium. UK courts have failed to see their DPA’s problem with facial recognition, despite citizens’ fears that it is highly invasive. In the only European ruling so far, Cardiff’s high court found police use of public face surveillance cameras to be proportionate and lawful, despite accepting that this technology infringes on the right to privacy.

The French DPA took a stronger stance than the UK’s DPA, advising a school in the city of Nice that the intrusiveness of facial recognition means that their planned face recognition project cannot be implemented legally. They emphasised the “particular sensitivity” of facial recognition due to its association with surveillance and its potential to violate rights to freedom and privacy, and highlighting the enhanced protections required for minors. Importantly, France’s DPA concluded that legally-compliant and equally effective alternatives to face recognition, such as using ID badges to manage student access, can and should be used instead. Echoing this stance, the European Data Protection Supervisor, Wojciech Wiewiórowski, issued a scathing condemnation of facial recognition, calling it a symptom of rising populist intolerance and “a solution in search of a problem.”

A lack of justification for the violation of fundamental rights

However, as in the UK, the French DPA’s views have frequently clashed with other public bodies. For example, the French government is pursuing the controversial Alicem digital identification system despite warnings that it does not comply with fundamental rights. There is also an inconsistency in the differentiation made between the surveillance of children and adults. The reason given by both France and Sweden for rejecting child facial recognition is that it will create problems for them in adulthood. Using this same logic, it is hard to see how the justification for any form of public face surveillance – especially when it is unavoidable, as in public spaces – would meet legal requirements of legitimacy or necessity, or be compliant with the GDPR’s necessarily strict rules for biometric data.

The risks and uncertainties outlined thus far have not stopped Member States accelerating their uptake of facial recognition technology. According to the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), Hungary is poised to deploy an enormous facial recognition system for multiple reasons including road safety and the Orwellian-sounding “public order” purposes; the Czech Republic is increasing its facial recognition capacity in Prague airport; “extensive” testing has been carried out by Germany and France; and EU-wide migration facial recognition is in the works. EDRi member SHARE Foundation have also reported on its illegal use in Serbia, where the interior ministry’s new system has failed to meet the most basic requirements under law. And of course, private actors also have a vested interest in influencing and orchestrating European face recognition use and policy: lobbying the EU, tech giant IBM has promoted its facial recognition technology to governments as “potentially life-saving” and even funded research that dismisses concerns about the ethical and human impacts of AI as “exaggerated fears.”

As Interpol admits, “standards and best practices [for facial recognition] are still in the process of being created.” Despite this, facial recognition continues to be used in both public and commercial spaces across the EU – unlike in the US, where four cities including San Francisco have proactively banned facial recognition for policing and other state uses, and a fifth, Portland, has started legislative proceedings to ban facial recognition for both public and private purposes – the widest ban so far.