French authorities have tested artificial intelligence surveillance systems at train stations, concerts and football matches in recent months.
"The Olympics are a huge opportunity to test this type of surveillance under the guise of security issues, and are paving the way to even more intrusive systems such as facial recognition," Katia Roux, advocacy lead at Amnesty International France, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.The French government has enlisted four companies in the effort - Videtics, Orange Business, ChapsVision and Wintics.
"One overarching concern is that while the majority of these use cases may not seem to involve revealing the identity of, or profiling, individual people, they still require the deployment of a surveillance infrastructure that is always one software update away from being able to do the most invasive kinds of mass surveillance," said Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst at digital rights group AccessNow.
Experts have concerns that the way the government is measuring the success of these tests, and the precise way this technology works, has not been made available to the public.There is nowhere near the necessary amount of transparency about these technologies.There is a very unfortunate narrative that we cannot permit transparency about such systems, particularly in a law enforcement or public security context, but this is nonsense.
"This is not a ban. That's actually an authorisation for law enforcement agencies. People have this illusion that because it says we are banning the technology - except in this, this and this situation - it's okay, but these situations are the most problematic ones," Roux said.