the proposal of the EU Parliament – Corriere.it

The European Parliament has voted, at committee level, to completely ban the use of facial recognition technologies in public places in the EU. On Thursday 11 May, the Justice and Internal Market commissions gave the green light to the negotiating mandate on the EU regulation on artificial intelligence with 84 votes in favour, 7 against and 12 abstentions. In their amendments to the Commission’s proposal, MEPs aim to ensure that AI systems are controlled by people, are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and respectful of the environment, the EU Parliament explains in a statement. Our proposal significantly strengthens the protection of fundamental rights, including the environment and democracy among the interests to be pursued, supporting innovation, research, new businesses and open source, giving clear rules to developers and businesses and public administrations who will use the products, declares in a note Brando Benifei, head of the Pd delegation and rapporteur of the measure approved by the commissions of the European Parliament.

The proposal of the EU Parliament

The text approved by the committees of the EU Parliament provides that systems that present an unacceptable level of risk for people’s safety are prohibited, in particular systems that use intentional manipulative techniques, those that exploit people’s vulnerabilities or are used for social scoring (classification of people based on their social behavior, socio-economic status, personal characteristics).

Prohibited technologies

Among the technologies which, according to the EU Parliament’s proposal, must be prohibited are: remote biometric identification systems in spaces accessible to the public, remote biometric identification systems. The only ones who will be able to use it will be the police but only with the authorization of the judiciary. Also prohibited are biometric categorization systems that use people’s gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, religion or political orientation, and predictive police systems (based on profiles, location or past criminal behavior), and emotion recognition systems in law enforcement . MEPs also added artificial intelligence systems capable of influencing voters in election campaigns and on the recommendation systems used by social media platforms to the list of high-risk technologies.

The next steps

The draft negotiating mandate will now have to be approved by the plenary of the European Parliament: the vote is expected during the session of 12-15 June. Then the trilogue will begin, i.e. the negotiations with the European Council and the Commission to arrive at a definitive text.