Comment by European Data Protection Board (EDPB)

Taking into account the extremely high risks posed by remote biometric identification of individuals in publicly accessible spaces, the EDPB and the EDPS call for a general ban on any use of AI for automated recognition of human features in publicly accessible spaces, such as recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioural signals, in any context. Similarly, the EDPB and EDPS recommend a ban on 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. Furthermore, the EDPB and the EDPS consider that the use of AI to infer emotions of a natural person is highly undesirable and should be prohibited, except for very specified cases, such as some health purposes, where the patient emotion recognition is important, and that the use of AI for any type of social scoring should be prohibited. Unverified source (2021)