Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1412606
14 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 15 SEPTEMBER 2021 NEWS ON 8 September 2021, the European Parliament's Policy Department for Cit- izens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs published a briefing about the report that considered the ethical issues sur- rounding use of biometric recognition and behavioural detection techniques in public spaces. The full report was prepared on re- quest of two committees of the Europe- an Parliament and published in August 2021. The report explores the deeply per- sonal nature of behavioural data such as a person's walk, voice, or gestures and provides recommendations for further regulation of biometric data to safeguard individuals against misuse of such data. The report also considers large-scale surveillance, algorithmic decision mak- ing, and profiling. After detailed analysis of various types of biometric techniques, the report considered how these techniques are addressed by the recent proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act (EU Reg- ulation on Artificial Intelligence or AI Regulation) of 21 April 2021, as well as by other legislative instruments (such as the proposed Data Governance Act), and whether this legislation addresses the ethical and fundamental rights is- sues in a comprehensive way. The report supports the general ap- proach to regulation of these technolo- gies in the AI Regulation but notes that the proposal does not address the ethi- cal concerns consistently. In view of this, the report recom- mends that the European Parliament and EU legislators consider a number of amendments (such as including specific provisions that would ensure respon- sible use of certain restricted AI prac- tices, such as biometric techniques and inferences). The key recommendations for legisla- tors include the following: • introduce a definition for 'bi- ometric inferences' and 'biome- tric-based data' and detach the definitions of 'emotion recogni- tion system' and 'biometric cate- gorisation system' from the con- cept of 'biometric data' as defined in the GDPR; • total or comprehensive surveil- lance of natural persons in their private or work life and of in- fringements of mental privacy and integrity should be included in the list of prohibited AI prac- tices in Article 5(1) AI Regulation. The list of prohibited AI practices should be reviewed and updated by the European Commission pe- riodically, potentially under the supervision of the European Par- liament; • introduce a new section on re- stricted AI applications, to ad- dress in detail: (i) 'real-time' re- mote biometric identification (and possibly other forms of re- al-time remote identification), including among other things, for law enforcement purposes, (ii) other biometric identification systems, emotion recognition systems and biometric categori- sation systems, while limiting the admissibility of such systems and integrating the transparency ob- ligations on operators of biome- tric systems; (iii) a new provision on decisions based on biometric techniques; and (iv) potential substantive limits to the drawing of biometric inferences; • consider introducing new provi- sions on automated consent man- agement in the GDPR or in the AI Regulation for situations where the use of biometric techniques is based on user's consent. Automat- ed consent management should enable the individuals to effective- ly manage consent and to use in- dependent tools or service provid- ers for consent management (such as data sharing service providers within the meaning of the Data Governance Act). Systems must be designed in a way that ensures automated transmission of con- sent (or its withdrawal) to all re- cipients of biometrics-based data and to allow automated erasure or other actions on the part of those recipients. European Parliament publishes briefing on ethical aspects of biometric recognition