Comment by European Digital Rights (EDRi)

On Wednesday 14 June 2023, the European Parliament voted to ban most public mass surveillance uses of biometric systems. This is the biggest achievement to date for the eighty organisations and quarter of a million people who have supported the Reclaim Your Face campaign's demand to end biometric mass surveillance (BMS) in Europe. Earlier in 2023, lead Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the internal markets and civil liberties committees brokered a draft deal which would ban several of the most harmful uses of AI systems which process biometric data. This deal is what was approved in the vote on the 14 June. This deal – agreed to by MEPs from all seven of the Parliament’s political groups – saw a total ban on the use of real time (aka live) public facial recognition and other biometric identification – like using people’s eyes or walking pattern (gait) to identify them – in public. The next ban was on retrospective deployments and uses in general, but with a carve-out for police, if they have judicial authorisation. Third, they banned the sale, deployment or use of systems which process biometric data – even if it doesn’t uniquely identify people – in order to categorise them based on skin colour, gender, or other sensitive characteristics; and fourth, the sale to, deployment or use of AI systems by police, border authorities, employers or educational authorities, to profile or predict people’s emotions.