The Senate, with a right-wing majority, approved this Monday in first reading a bill to create a legal framework for the use of biometric technologies, which opens the way, on an experimental basis, to facial recognition “in especially serious cases.” The vote was acquired by 226 votes against 117, having voted against the left.
Facial recognition or biometric techniques have been excluded by the government from the technological arsenal mobilized to ensure the Olympic Games that will take place in Paris in 2024.
But during the Olympic bill debate in January, Senator LR Marc-Philippe Daubresse indicated he would introduce a bill to establish a framework for future use. This text, co-signed by the centrist Arnaud de Belenet, intends, according to its authors, “to establish clear red lines in the law to eliminate the risk of a surveillance society.”
three years of experimentation
Specified in committee by the rapporteur LR Philippe Bas, the text prohibits “any categorization and notation” of people “on the basis of their biometric data”. Nothing of “Chinese-style social control,” the rapporteur evacuated. He also sets out the principle of a general ban on “any remote recognition” of people on the basis of this data.
Once these red lines are defined, the bill provides for the cases in which facial recognition could nevertheless be used. The speaker limited them, in the judicial framework, to investigations into “the most serious crimes” and, in the field of intelligence and security, “to the fight against the risk of terrorism”.
It envisions a three-year experiment, subject to “robust prior authorization regimes and ongoing monitoring.”
Source: BFM TV
