The European Commission is considering measures to impose a temporary ban on facial recognition technologies used by both public and private actors, according to a draft white paper on Artificial Intelligence...

More generally, the draft White Paper, the completed version of which the Commission should publish towards the end of February, features five regulatory options for Artificial Intelligence across the bloc.

The different regulatory branches considered by the Commission in the paper are:

- Voluntary labelling

- Sectorial requirements for public administration and facial recognition

- Mandatory risk-based requirements for high-risk applications

- Safety and liability

- Governance...

As for facial recognition, the Commission document highlights provisions from the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which give citizens “the right not to be subject of a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling.”

In the third area which the Commission is currently priming for regulation, legally binding instruments would apply only “to high–risk applications of artificial intelligence...

Certain sectors which could be considered high risk include healthcare, transport, policing and the judiciary...