European authorities are competing to deploy facial recognition tech. Nice in southern France is in the lead.
NICE, France — Welcome to France's facial recognition laboratory.
With its pebble beaches and iconic Promenade des Anglais boardwalk, the Riviera city of Nice is best-known as a holiday destination favored by tourists and well-heeled French retirees.
But the city is carving out another niche under the leadership of right-wing mayor Christian Estrosi — as a testing ground for high-tech surveillance tools that are alarming digital rights activists, testing the boundaries of European privacy law and setting parents on edge.
The deployment of more than 2,600 CCTV cameras was just a first step. In February, Nice became the first French city to start trialing facial recognition tools in its streets thanks to cameras that scanned the faces of thousands of adults attending a carnival, matching their likenesses against a database of faces as part of a large-scale experiment.
Now, the regional authority that runs schools around Nice is waiting for an opinion from regulators for another first: deploying facial recognition at the entrances of two regional high schools, in an experiment that has led to howls of protest from parents, teachers' unions and privacy activists.
Earlier this year, Europe's data protection authorities warned that facial recognition entails “heightened risks” for fundamental rights and freedoms.As France's CNIL privacy watchdog deliberates the question — the cameras are paused pending its opinion — Nice's surveillance drive under Estrosi is feeding a broader debate about the growing use of facial recognition in public and its effect on civil liberties.
Championed by security hawks as a crime-fighting tool, the technology has nonetheless been banned in tech-savvy San Francisco, while earlier this month the California Senate outlawed the use of biometric tech for law enforcement amid fears of human rights violations and errors identifying women and minorities.
On the other extreme, China's deployment of facial recognition tech is opening a window into a world of limitless surveillance. During pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong earlier this year, demonstrators sawed down towers equipped with face-scanning cameras to avoid detection by authorities. Meanwhile, Muslim Uighur minorities in the Chinese hinterland face such constant biometric surveillance that the New York Times has dubbed their region a "technological prison."
Europe, as Nice's example shows, has yet to make up its mind.......MUCH MORE
