Notices by Ella Jakubowska (ella@eupolicy.social)

The EU's landmark #AIAct was agreed at minutes to midnight yesterday. Whilst lawmakers celebrate, human rights groups are sceptical.

As someone who's spent years calling on the EU to #BanBiometricMassSurveillance via the @reclaimyourface campaign, here's my take on where they landed:

Real-time public facial recognition (RBI): disappointingly, but not surprisingly, member states resisted a full ban. The Parliament fought hard to narrow exceptions and add more safeguards, but it doesn't look like it will be enough to stop widespread biometric mass surveillance.

Real-time RBI 'safeguards': at the press conf, lead MEPs seemed to suggest there would be no possibility for retrospective authorisation. ...(cont'd)

...I really hope so, otherwise member states will have a blank cheque to ignore the (already insufficient) rules for 48 hours with impunity;

Retrospective (ex-post) public facial recognition (RBI): our expectations were depressingly low here, so it is a pleasant surprise to see some movement. The limitation of use to 'serious crimes' could be an improvement on the status quo, depending on the wording;

Biometric categorisation: the negotiators are advertising a full ban on categorising sensitive characteristics like race and gender using biometrics. This sounds great, but I'm worried that they have worded it in a way which creates big loopholes. One to watch;

Emotion recognition: a full ban on uses in workplaces and education contexts is certainly a win, but it's incoherent to make uses in policing and migration only high-risk (which is what we assume they have done). ... (cont'd)

...This tech is fundamentally flawed and based in eugenics;

Scraping for FRT databases: this 'ClearviewAI' provision is a win, bolstering data protection authorities who have stated that mass scraping of facial images is impermissible on the basis of EU law. But why only faces and not all biometric data?

Transparency: we know that member states had pushed hard to exclude biometric systems (and all policing and migration systems) from public transparency rules. So far, negotiators have been very quiet on this point, leading me to suspect the worst;