![](\"https:\/\/media.wired.com\/photos\/624ca6e922287e54ebc7f22d\/master\/pass\/Europe-Facial-Recognition-1041091610.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Credit to Author: Matt Burgess| Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2022 11:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Matt Burgess<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n For the past<\/span> 15 years, police forces searching for criminals in Europe have been able to share fingerprints, DNA data, and details of vehicle owners with each other. If officials in France suspect someone they are looking for is in Spain, they can ask Spanish authorities to check fingerprints against their database. Now European lawmakers are set to include millions of photos of people\u2019s faces in this system\u2014and allow facial recognition to be used on an unprecedented scale.<\/p>\n The expansion of facial recognition across Europe is included in wider plans to \u201cmodernize\u201d policing<\/a> across the continent, and it comes under the Pr\u00fcm II<\/a> data-sharing proposals. The details were first announced in December, but criticism from European data regulators has gotten louder in recent weeks, as the full impact of the plans have been understood.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat you are creating is the most extensive biometric surveillance infrastructure that I think we will ever have seen in the world,\u201d says Ella Jakubowska, a policy adviser at the civil rights NGO European Digital Rights (EDRi). Documents obtained by EDRi under freedom of information laws and shared with WIRED reveal how nations pushed for facial recognition to be included in the international policing agreement.<\/p>\n The first iteration of Pr\u00fcm was signed by seven European countries\u2014Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Austria\u2014back in 2005 and allows nations to share data to tackle international crime. Since Pr\u00fcm was introduced, take-up by Europe's 27 countries has been mixed<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pr\u00fcm II plans to significantly expand the amount of information that can be shared, potentially including photos and information from driving licenses. The proposals from the European Commission<\/a> also say police will have greater \u201cautomated\u201d access to information that\u2019s shared. Lawmakers say this means police across Europe will be able to cooperate closely, and the European law enforcement agency Europol will have a \u201cstronger role.\u201d<\/p>\n The inclusion of facial images and the ability to run facial recognition algorithms against them are among the biggest planned changes in Pr\u00fcm II. Facial recognition technology has faced significant pushback in recent years as police forces have increasingly adopted it<\/a>, and it has misidentified people and derailed lives<\/a>. Dozens of cities in the US have gone as far as banning police forces<\/a> from using the technology. The EU is debating a ban on the police use of facial recognition in public places<\/a> as part of its AI Act<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, Pr\u00fcm II allows the use of retrospective facial recognition. This means police forces can compare still images from CCTV cameras, photos from social media, or those on a victim\u2019s phone against mug shots held on a police database. The technology is different from live facial recognition systems, which are often connected to cameras in public spaces; these have faced the most criticism<\/a>.<\/p>\n The European proposals allow a nation to compare a photo against the databases of other countries and find out if there are matches\u2014essentially creating one of the largest facial recognition systems in existence. One document obtained by EDRi says the number of potential matches could range from between 10 and 100 faces, although this figure needs to be finalized by politicians. A European Commission spokesperson says that a human will review the potential matches and decide if any of them are correct, before any further action is taken. \u201cIn a significant number of cases, a facial image of a suspect is available,\u201d France\u2019s interior minister said in the documents. It claimed to have solved burglary and child sexual abuse cases using its facial recongition system.<\/p>\n The Pr\u00fcm II documents, dated from April 2021, when the plans were first being discussed, show the huge number of face photos that countries hold. Hungary has 30 million photos, Italy 17 million, France 6 million, and Germany 5.5 million, the documents show. These images can include suspects, those convicted of crimes, asylum seekers, and \u201cunidentified dead bodies,\u201d and they come from multiple sources in each country.<\/p>\n Jakubowska says that while criticism of facial recognition systems has mostly focused on real-time systems, those that identify people at a later date are still problematic. \u201cWhen you are applying facial recognition to footage or images retrospectively, sometimes the harms can be even greater, because of the capacity to look back at, say, a protest from three years ago, or to see who I met five years ago, because I'm now a political opponent,\u201d she says. \u201cOnly facial images of suspects or convicted criminals can be exchanged,\u201d the European Commission spokesperson says, citing a guide on how the system will work<\/a>. \u201cThere will be no matching of facial images to the general population.\u201d<\/p>\n Pictures of people\u2019s faces shouldn\u2019t be combined in one giant central database, the official proposal<\/a> says, but police forces will be linked together through a \u201ccentral router.\u201d This router won\u2019t store any data, the European Commission spokesperson says, adding that it will \u201conly act as a message broker\u201d between nations. This decentralized approach makes Pr\u00fcm II more straightforward: Police wanting to compare fingerprints under the current system must connect to other police forces individually. Under the new infrastructure, countries only need one connection to the central router and it will be easier to \u201cadd additional data categories to the system,\u201d the documents obtained by EDRi say.<\/p>\n The European data protection superviser (EDPS), who oversees how EU bodies use data under GDPR<\/a>, has criticized the planned expansion of Pr\u00fcm, which could take several years. \u201cAutomated searching of facial images is not limited only to serious crimes but could be carried out for the prevention, detection, and investigation of any criminal offenses, even a petty one,\u201d Wojciech Wiewi\u00f3rowski, the EDPS, said in early March<\/a>. Wiewi\u00f3rowski said more safeguards should be written into the proposals to make sure people\u2019s privacy rights are protected. The European Commission spokesperson says the body has taken \u201cgood note\u201d of the EDPS opinion and the thoughts will be taken into account as the European Parliament and Council discuss the legislation.<\/p>\n During the development of the plans, Slovenia has been one key country pushing for the expansion\u2014including asking for people\u2019s driving license data<\/a> to be included. Domen Savi\u010d, the CEO of Slovenian digital rights group Dr\u017eavljan D, says there are significant concerns about the differences between police databases and who is included. \u201cI haven't heard enough to be convinced that all of this data gathered by individual police forces is sanitized in the same way,'' Savi\u010d says.<\/p>\n Police databases are often poorly put together. In July 2021, police in the Netherlands deleted 218,000 photos it wrongly included<\/a> in its facial recognition database. In the UK, more than a thousand young Black men were removed from a \u201cgangs database\u201d<\/a> in February 2021. \u201cYou could have databases that have completely different backgrounds in terms of how this data was collected, where it was sourced, how it was exchanged, and who approved what,\u201d Savi\u010d says. Slovenia has already faced similar problems<\/a>. \u201cAnd this could lead to misidentification.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the biggest problems for Jakubowska is how Pr\u00fcm II could normalize the use of facial recognition by police forces across Europe. \u201cWhat really concerns us is how much this Pr\u00fcm II proposal could incentivize the creation of facial image databases and the application of algorithms to these databases to perform facial recognition,\u201d she says. The EU will pay for the cost of connecting databases to Pr\u00fcm II, the proposal says, and this includes the cost of creating new national facial images databases. Sixty years after being invented, facial recognition<\/a> is still just getting started.<\/p>\n