The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has said that a vote in the European Parliament earlier this week has “very serious implications” for the Government’s plans to allow gardaí to use facial-recognition technology (FRT).
In a vote on Thursday (11 May), two committees of MEPs backed a draft negotiating mandate on the European Commission’s proposals for new rules on artificial intelligence (AI).
The MEPs backed an amended list of AI systems that would be prohibited – including ‘real-time’ remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces.
‘Loopholes’
The committees’ mandate also includes a ban on the indiscriminate scraping of biometric data from social-media or CCTV footage to create facial-recognition databases.
Before negotiations with the EU Council on the final form of the proposed law can begin, the draft negotiating mandate needs to be endorsed by the whole parliament, with a vote expected during its 12-15 June session.
The ICCL welcomed the outcome of the vote, saying that it had “fixed many loopholes”, and brought systems like ChatGPT into scope.
ICCL Senior Fellow Dr Kris Shrishak warned, however, that MEPs had “failed to take a firm stand on preventing companies from gobbling up data for free”.
He added that they had also “tied regulators’ hands” by preventing them from accessing the source code of AI systems for investigations.
Retrospective use
Olga Cronin (Senior Policy Officer, Surveillance and Human Rights) welcomed the move to ban live FRT in public spaces, but expressed concern that law-enforcement agencies could still use retrospective FRT under the draft legislation.
"FRT systems risk rights because they can allow for disproportionate mass surveillance, and turn us into human licence-plates by enabling the identification and tracking of individuals without warranted suspicion,” she said.
Minister for Justice Simon Harris told the Dáil earlier this year, however, that FRT had “potentially transformational benefits” for some areas of police work, adding that the Garda Commissioner and staff had made “a compelling case” for the use of such technology in certain, limited circumstances.