EDPS and the EDPB call for a tightening of the EU draft legislation on the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

26. July 2021

In a joint statement, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) call for a general ban on the use of artificial intelligence for the automated recognition of human characteristics in publicly accessible spaces. This refers to surveillance technologies that recognise faces, human gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioral signals. In addition to the AI-supported recognition of human characteristics in public spaces, the EDPS and EPDB also call for a ban of AI systems using biometrics to categorize individuals into clusters based on ethnicity, gender, political or sexual orientation, or other grounds on which discrimination is prohibited under Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. With the exception of individual applications in the medical field, EDPS and the EDPB are also calling for a ban on AI for sentiment recognition.

In April, the EU Commission presented a first draft law on the regulation of AI applications. The draft explicitly excluded the area of international law enforcement cooperation. The EDPS and EDPB expressed “concern” about the exclusion of international law enforcement cooperation from the scope of the draft. The draft is based on a categorisation of different AI applications into different types of risk, which are to be regulated to different degrees depending on the level of risk to the fundamental rights. In principle, the EDPS and EDPB support this approach and the fact that the EU is addressing the issue in general. However, they call for this concept of fundamental rights risk to be adapted to the EU data protection framework.

Andrea Jelinek, EDPB Chair, and Wojciech Wiewiórowski, of the EDPS, are quoted:

Deploying remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces means the end of anonymity in those places. Applications such as live facial recognition interfere with fundamental rights and freedoms to such an extent that they may call into question the essence of these rights and freedoms.

The EDPS and EDPB explicitly support, that the draft provides for national data protection authorities to become competent supervisory authorities for the application of the new regulation and explicitly welcome, that the EDPS is intended to be the competent authority and the market surveillance authority for the supervision of the Union institutions, agencies and bodies. The idea that the Commission also gives itself a predominant role in the “European Artificial Intelligence Board” is questioned by the EU data protection authorities. “This contradicts the need for a European AI Board that is independent of political influence”. They call for the board to be given more autonomy, to ensure its independence.

Worldwide there is great resistance against the use of biometric surveillance systems in public spaces. A large global alliance of 175 civil society organisations, academics and activists is calling for a ban on biometric surveillance in public spaces. The concern is that the potential for abuse of these technologies is too great and the consequences too severe. For example, the BBC reports that China is testing a camera system on Uighurs in Xinjiang that uses AI and facial recognition to detect emotional states. This system is supposed to serve as a kind of modern lie detector and be used in criminal proceedings, for example.