DATAFACE | Close Up: Your ID is Your Face

Summary
In the age of artificial intelligence, identifying anyone in public space through facial recognition is becoming faster and easier. However, the technologies are not without flaws. Recent studies have shown that the technologies are prone to gender and skin-colour biases, and not highly accurate. Despite their imperfections, governments around the world deploy the technologies at a breakneck pace. Strong criticisms have been heard over the lack of appropriate legal frameworks to regulate technologies that can negatively impact civil liberties and personal freedoms. Since a few years, concerns have further grown concerning their use in China where they are deployed to support a social credit system to rate citizens’ behaviour. Facial recognition technologies can potentially be very pervasive surveillance tools. The proposed research will identify the threats and risks that the use of facial recognition for surveillance purposes poses to the rights to privacy and data protection as defined at EU level. The objective is to define the legitimate and proportionate uses of the technologies based on country trends (France, UK, USA, and China), their technical characteristics, and the legal frameworks applicable to the rights to privacy and data protection.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/895978
Start date: 01-09-2020
End date: 31-08-2023
Total budget - Public funding: 267 480,00 Euro - 267 480,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

In the age of artificial intelligence, identifying anyone in public space through facial recognition is becoming faster and easier. However, the technologies are not without flaws. Recent studies have shown that the technologies are prone to gender and skin-colour biases, and not highly accurate. Despite their imperfections, governments around the world deploy the technologies at a breakneck pace. Strong criticisms have been heard over the lack of appropriate legal frameworks to regulate technologies that can negatively impact civil liberties and personal freedoms. Since a few years, concerns have further grown concerning their use in China where they are deployed to support a social credit system to rate citizens’ behaviour. Facial recognition technologies can potentially be very pervasive surveillance tools. The proposed research will identify the threats and risks that the use of facial recognition for surveillance purposes poses to the rights to privacy and data protection as defined at EU level. The objective is to define the legitimate and proportionate uses of the technologies based on country trends (France, UK, USA, and China), their technical characteristics, and the legal frameworks applicable to the rights to privacy and data protection.

Status

CLOSED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2019

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2019
MSCA-IF-2019