Given the shutdown/attack today, which targeted stations far from the capital, this, ah… did not go well.
Excerpts from article:
Security measures in Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to crawl CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats.
After training its algorithms on both open source and synthetic data, Wintics’ systems have been adapted to, for example, count the number of people in a crowd or the number of people falling to the floor—alerting operators once the number exceeds a certain threshold.
Houllier argues that his algorithms are a privacy-friendly alternative to controversial facial recognition systems used by past global sporting events, such as the 2022 Qatar World Cup. “Here we are trying to find another way,” he says. To him, letting the algorithms crawl CCTV footage is a way to ensure the event is safe without jeopardizing personal freedoms. “We are not analyzing any personal data. We are just looking at shapes, no face, no license plate recognition, no behavioral analytics.”
Levain is concerned the AI surveillance systems will remain in France long after the athletes leave. To her, these algorithms enable the police and security services to impose surveillance on wider stretches of the city. “This technology will reproduce the stereotypes of the police,” she says. “We know that they discriminate. We know that they always go in the same area. They always go and harass the same people. And this technology, as with every surveillance technology, will help them do that.”
Some months ago, there was a nice documentary about police surveillance in Spain, and how European privacy laws differ from, for example, Chinese ones.
In China, all CCTV systems recognize all they can from everyone all the time, and if you jaywalk, they show your photo, full name, DOB, full names of family and friends, etc. on a huge display next to the crosswalk in order to shame you.
In Spain (and EU), the CCTV systems are prohibited from doing facial recognition or linking a person to personal information… so they only recognize things like “blonde in red shirt and white pants, around 165cm, with a certain gait pattern” went through this one crosswalk at this time… and then trace that [anonymous] person hours into the past and into the future based on all the recordings they keep.
“Technically”, in EU the person stays anonymous. Practically, they record enough data points to perfectly identify anyone they wish… but the system doesn’t do it automatically, so it’s all OK… 🤷