The European Parliament has voted to back a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. AI-powered remote surveillance technologies such as facial recognition have huge implications for fundamental rights and freedoms like privacy but are already creeping into use in public in Europe. To respect "privacy and human dignity", MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces, saying citizens should only be monitored when suspected of a crime. The parliament has also called for a ban on the use of private facial recognition databases -- such as the controversial AI system created by US startup Clearview (also already in use by some police forces in Europe) -- and said predictive policing based on behavioural data should also be outlawed. MEPs also want to ban social scoring systems which seek to rate the trustworthiness of citizens based on their behaviour or personality.

Your body is a data goldmine. From the way you look to how you think and feel, firms working in the burgeoning biometrics industry are developing new and alarming ways to track everything we do. And, in many cases, you may not even know you're being tracked. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. But the biometrics business is on a collision course with Europe's leading data protection experts.