#AI#EU#AIAct#Biometrics#Surveillance#MassSurveillance: "Throughout spring 2024, European Union (EU) lawmakers have been taking the final procedural steps to pass a largely disappointing new law, the EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.
This law is expected to come into force in the summer, with one of the most hotly-contested parts of the law – the bans on unacceptably harmful uses of AI – slated to apply from the end of 2024 (six months and 20 days after the legal text is officially published).
The first draft of this Act, in 2021, proposed to ban some forms of public facial recognition, showing that lawmakers were already listening to the demands of our Reclaim Your Face campaign. Since then, the AI Act has continued to be a focus point for our fight to stop people being treated as walking barcodes in public spaces.
But after a gruelling three-year process, AI Act negotiations are coming to an underwhelming end, with numerous missed opportunities to protect people’s rights and freedoms or to uphold civic space.
One of the biggest problems we see is that the bans on different forms of biometric mass surveillance, or BMS, are full of holes. BMS is the term we’ve used as an umbrella for different methods of using people’s biometric data to surveil them in an untargeted or arbitrarily-targeted way – which have no place in a democratic society."
