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.

Once a dominion of science fiction (e.g., Star Trek,) facial recognition technology has not only caught up to us in reality this century, but awareness around its benefits and pitfalls has also risen with its heightened presence in the news over the last few months. We hope to shine some light on the reasons for this ascent and the myriad thoughts and actions it has raised. To be sure, all the complex issues, implications, and ethics surrounding facial recognition technology are far too important and expansive to cover in this piece. We also recognize there is much more worth exploring, and a variety of valid and informed views on the subject. Our aim is for this piece to be informative, unbiased, and thought-provoking as the topic of facial recognition technology continues to gain attention and relevance.

The field of AI is rapidly advancing, and pretty soon, we will get to the point where we no longer even have to search for something to find it. We will simply be able to point our smartphone cameras at it, and the AI algorithms will take care of the rest. Even though a lot of companies have been at the forefront of adopting this technology into their service offering, for the most part, it is still being used to extract information from a given image. In order to train the AI algorithms to identify objects or people in an image, researchers input lots of annotated data into the system so it can learn to recognize whatever is needed. The image data can be virtually in any form, such as video, views from many cameras, multi-dimensional data, and many other types.