France’s government plans for camera surveillance to be upgraded with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris have been met with fierce criticism among French MPs, who are warning of unnecessary security superseding civil liberties.
The scrutiny of the plan has been further punctuated by 770 amendments proposed by MPs to the overall proposed security bill, with many of these amendments targeting “Article Seven”. If the bill is passed into law, it will allow surveillance recordings to be processed through AI algorithms, allowing officials to detect and preemptively “spot potential dangers”. This includes spikes in seemingly abnormal crowd movements, or unexplainable abandoned bags, which will all be flagged to police and security services.
The government strongly emphasizes that no biometric data will be collected during surveillance, and that facial recognition software will definitely not be used. They claim that the trial would be strictly time-limited, and that the AI will never replace human judgement. While there is a survey from February conducted by Figaro Daily that shows a majority of the population is in favor of camera surveillance, opposition groups such as La Quadrature du Net (QDN) outlines that this system would violate biometric data as defined by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
MPs from the European Parliament voiced similar concerns with the plan in an open letter, commenting that it would create a “surveillance precedent never before seen in Europe”. Furthermore, the plan is not only limited to the Olympic Games, with figures from the Interior Ministry confirming that it would cover a wide variety of large events including the Rugby World Cup this year.
In addition, the bill has been used as a shop window for French companies. Rights activists, like QDN’s Naomi Levain, believes that this planned experiment would mainly benefit the security industry, which is estimated to be worth a total of 1.7 billion euros alone in France (with the global market being much larger). Levain further commented that the Olympic Games has been used in the past to pass legislation that wouldn’t normally pass in regular times, an opinion that was shared by Socialist MP Roger Vicot.
The overall article is relaying an important message- that the French government’s road to upgrading their surveillance systems for the Paris Olympics needs to come with strong caution. Emphasis on privacy and personal freedom, backed by French MPs, needs to be taken into account before such a decision is made.
