No facial recognition surveillance device will be deployed in France as part of the Paris Olympics in 2024, an event that could have served as a springboard for this technology.
From 2019, in anticipation of the holding of the Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024, the government had launched an experimental phase for video surveillance by facial recognition, in order to secure the sites of the competitions. An experiment launched when the Cnil is very vigilant on the subject and this technology is contrary to the GDPR.
Despite these tests, the Secretary of State for Digital, Cédric O, finally informed the members of the facial recognition information mission that it would not be deployed in France as part of this event. “We will have to find ways to ensure security without facial recognition”he says.
The fact is that in reality, “most of the experiments could not be carried out and the debate did not take place”, he confesses. In question, the health crisis linked to Covid-19 which has refocused priorities on other subjects.
“Dozens of Olympic Games have been organized without facial recognition. Could we have, in the context of a presidential election, with the political superego that inhabits us all, having a peaceful debate on the fact of deploying facial recognition in the context of the Olympics? I’m not sure. I’m even certain of the opposite”explains Cédric O, referring to a subject “highly political”.
The Secretary of State also says “believe little enough” to the generalization of a technology that generates “still a lot of false negatives and false positives”.