This article was originally published in
German
and has been automatically translated.
The Bavarian police are to be able to carry out live facial recognition in public spaces with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) is campaigning for this. “The police urgently need more opportunities to use biometric facial recognition to investigate criminals,” the politician demands. According to Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), he wants to use cameras already installed in train stations or large squares for this purpose. He does not see any problems with data protection: “It is clear that photos that do not produce a match will be deleted immediately.”
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If a program sounds the alarm and reports a match, the police would first have to check: “Is it really true?” according to the Minister of the Interior. Because the software also makes mistakes, Herrmann explained to BR. Nevertheless, he was confident that this technology could significantly increase the success of searches. The State Criminal Police Office (LKA) has been using the option of comparing images of unknown suspects with photos from a criminal database of the Federal Criminal Police Office for many years. This is a special register that investigators consult when there is a concrete suspicion of a crime. The Internet is not searched for photos.
Herrmann considers this approach to be successful in principle: in 2023, the LKA processed more than 4,600 cases with facial recognition software as part of criminal investigations. In around 1,200 of these cases, there were matches with people already known to the police and thus “valuable further investigative approaches”. But now he no longer wants to do without the use of real-time facial recognition. This form of surveillance was considered a hot potato during the negotiations on the EU’s AI regulation. The final version stipulates that real-time identification should be possible “for a limited time and place”: for the targeted search for victims of kidnapping, human trafficking and sexual exploitation or to prevent “a specific and present terrorist threat”. The localization or identification of suspects in connection with several serious crimes is also mentioned as a further purpose.
“Serious encroachment on fundamental rights”
The Bavarian data protection commissioner, Thomas Petri, raises constitutional concerns about the plan: “This is a serious encroachment on the fundamental rights of all people who move around and stay in these public places,” he complained to BR. The suitability for everyday use is also doubtful: even if the hit rate is 98 percent, hundreds of people would still be wrongly removed from traffic at Munich Central Station, for example.
Kai Engelbrecht, Ministerial Councillor at the State Data Protection Commissioner, emphasized to heise online that real-time face recognition would be possible “at best to protect particularly important legal interests and under narrow conditions of intervention”. Furthermore, “suitable precautions would have to be taken to ensure that misidentifications are virtually impossible” and that “blameless” citizens would not be wrongly subjected to police measures in retrospect.
The state commissioner is not yet aware of any draft legislation, reported Engelbrecht. There had therefore been no reason to comment and evaluate such a potential project in terms of data protection law. However, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) considers the remote processing of biometric data in public spaces to be a disproportionate intrusion. The data protection conference of the federal and state governments also warns of “considerable risks” with automated facial recognition.
Faeser is also in favor of more biometric searches
An employee of the Saxon Data Protection Commissioner Juliane Hundert recently emphasized: “In view of the Federal Constitutional Court’s statements on preventive measures of automated license plate recognition, there should be no doubt that real-time biometric processing and live comparison of facial images of people passing through a surveillance camera in public spaces violates the constitution.”
Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) wants to allow federal and state police forces to carry out a “biometric comparison with publicly accessible data from the internet” when searching for suspected terrorists and serious criminals, for example. This would not only apply to suspects, but also to “contact persons, victims and witnesses”. However, Faeser’s proposal does not include a live component, which means that Herrmann does not go far enough. Nevertheless, critics also warn against “total surveillance of public space”.
(mki)
