As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 21st of January, 2020, the European Union (EU) wants to ban the use of facial recognition technology within five years, but in spite of that, the Croatian Ministry of the Interior (MUP) has announced a tender for the adoption of such technology so that it can profile all citizens of Split in a mere two minutes and all citizens of Zagreb in just ten minutes.
Alphabet, the company that earns the most revenue from the use of artificial intelligence in online advertising and develops some of the most widespread AI technologies in the world, including those built into Android mobile phones, has called on the US and the EU to regulate AI and bring it into line properly. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai posted a comment in the Financial Times (FT) stating that it is not questionable whether AI should be regulated, and that the question rests solely on how to approach it.
“Companies like ours can not only develop new, promising technologies and let the market decide how they will be used, it’s fundamental for us to ensure that the technologies we’ve developed are used for good and are accessible to everyone,” Pichai wrote.
The United States and the European Union are already preparing artificial intelligence regulations. While the US proposes a soft approach, the EU is considering totalling banning the use of AI-based face recognition technology within the next five years to help the bloc’s extensive legislature keep up with the advances and applications of such technology.
The EU took that route after China demonstrated that facial recognition technology, paired with access to all cameras in China’s public and private space, could be used not only to search for criminals but also to fully track the movements and behaviour of its citizens, which is a gross invasion of privacy.
In one of the richest EU member states, the United Kingdom, a regulator has launched an investigation against a developer called Argent over the use of facial recognition technology on cameras in London’s King’s Cross, also known as St. Pancras from which the Eurostar train departs for both Paris and Brussels.
The investigation came about after the media found out that Argent was recording and profiling tens of thousands of citizens on a daily basis, and entirely without their knowledge. This is a particularly sensitive issue in London, which has the most cameras in public spaces in all of Europe, more than half a million of them, already used by police to prevent crime and search for criminals.
MUP appears unaffected by the negativity surrounding such technology, and recently MUP announced a tender worth 2.8 million kuna through which it seeks out facial recognition software that would enable it to identify the faces of 3000 citizens in mere seconds.
Pichai is naturally concerned that the US and the EU have started to regulate AI in different directions. All major companies, including Alphabet’s Google, then Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple are developing their own AI technology offers and are already offering it to some extent or another here in Croatia as cloud services.
For more on MUP, follow our dedicated lifestyle page.
