European Privacy Watchdogs Demand Total Ban on Public Facial Recognition
Two major European privacy authorities urge lawmakers to completely ban facial recognition and emotion-detecting AI in all public spaces to protect fundamental rights.
European privacy watchdogs call for a complete ban on facial recognition technology in all publicly accessible spaces. The European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor issue a joint recommendation that highlights the "extremely high" risks these systems pose to personal privacy and fundamental freedoms.
This push for stricter regulation responds directly to recent proposals from the European Commission, which restrict but do not completely outlaw live facial recognition for law enforcement. The privacy authorities argue that the current bill does not go far enough and demand a blanket prohibition on automated recognition of human features, including faces, gait, fingerprints, voice, and other biometric signals in any context.
Beyond facial recognition, the watchdogs urge the bloc to outlaw AI systems that infer emotions, perform social scoring, or categorize individuals by ethnicity, gender, or political orientation. They warn that deploying such remote biometric identification in public effectively destroys anonymity and interferes with human rights to a degree that threatens the essence of those freedoms.