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The action and the fanfare around the 2024 Paris Olympics may have come to an end, but there is still plenty of talking to be done on the issue of AI-powered CCTV.
A sense of normality now rests on the Stade de France, Paris, and its surroundings, but what about the legacy of the security arrangements? For the duration of the showpiece event, French authorities bolstered the security apparatus with algorithmic video surveillance (VSA) and the trial is set to continue until March 2025, as exclusively revealed by TechRadar.
However, with the added security capability comes serious privacy concerns, as expressed by Félix Tréguer, a campaign member of a leading digital rights advocacy group.
“The ongoing experiments are the first step towards the legalization of these technologies,” he opined to TechRadar. Tréguer believes with each passing large-scale event, more justification will be given for the long-term introduction of the enhanced technology.
In May last year, the French government passed laws on an ad-hoc basis to effectively usher in a trial period for the use of AI-led surveillance until March 31, 2025. This set a precedent for the first time VSA was enshrined in law in the European Union.
200 cameras in Paris and the wider Île-de-France region have been supplemented by AI for the Olympics, with a further 300 cameras using the same system across 46 subway stations.
VSA goes beyond the realm of facial recognition, sparking more concern and opposition to how it works. An algorithm determines the direction of the cameras to detect specific predefined movements, which then sends an alert to operatives to act on the situation.
The training of the algorithm included the detection of population density, certain crowd movements, lost luggage, and potentially dangerous situations. Smoke, fire, bodies on the ground, sudden movements, and abandoned objects are all within the scope of VSA.
Warnings From Privacy Experts
The French Interior Ministry has stated: “The operational alert remains in the sole hands of the operators who decide whether or not to report the detected situation,” but the issue runs much deeper.
Privacy experts have warned that VSA encapsulates various biometric data, which is protected personal data. Organizations such as La Quadrature du Net and Katia Roux, a technology and human rights specialist at Amnesty International France have outlined to TechRadar how the AI-led CCTV violates international human rights laws, posing a risk to the right to privacy, the freedom of assembly and association, and the right to non-discrimination.
The next stage is likely to see increased opposition from campaigners, while authorities will be keen to maximize the benefits of AI support for surveillance. The present VSA experiment in France will most likely lapse, but it will only be a matter of time, especially around large international events, before we see a similar arrangement in place.
