BRUSSELS ¨C Facial recognition has friends in Europe. Live trials of real-time face tracking have taken place over the past year in countries such as the United Kingdom and France, by and large without falling foul of the continent¡¯s sweeping but haphazardly enforced data protection laws.
This should be a wake-up call for regulators to act. But the trials also offer a taste of the public safety argument that will be trotted out to defend this intrusive, flawed technology, glamorized by TV shows like ¡°24¡± to solve fictional terrorist plots.
The example of the French city of Nice, whose Mayor Christian Estrosi has been doubling down on surveillance technology in the wake of a terrorist attack in 2016, is instructive. An experiment with facial recognition at the city¡¯s carnival in February ¡ª promoted on YouTube as a miracle tool that reunited lost relatives, identified suspicious people and kept the public safe ¡ª was recently deemed a success by the mayor¡¯s office. No complaints from the people taking part, no false positives and a ¡°100 percent¡± rate of identification of ¡°persons of interest,¡± according to Le Monde.
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