Facial Recognition in the Public Space: Challenges and Perspectives

Due to technological advances, AI systems, among them facial recognition, are becoming more commonplace, a development which garners ethical and privacy-related concerns and has prompted the European Commission to develop the proposed AI Act of 2021. This study investigates whether current legislation, including the proposed AI Act, is enough to properly regulate the use of facial recognition systems in public spaces in the European Union. To this purpose, we outline the current status of EU legislation regarding these systems, examine several case studies of real-world use of such systems and the response thereto, and identify overarching ethical and legal issues that arise from these case studies. We find that currently, the ambiguous phrasing in the proposed legislation, combined with lack of enforcement of the need for consent, means that legislation is not sufficient to regulate the use of facial recognition in public spaces in the European Union. Therefore, based on the observations from the case studies, we make several recommendations that, when followed, encourage the use of facial recognition systems in public spaces in an ethical, legal and responsible way.