Paris (AFP)

Move around, you are stared at ... In full anti-racist mobilization, the American internet giants assure that they want to limit the safe use of facial recognition, but according to specialists, it would take more to stem the boom of this technology, coveted by police forces around the world.

Under pressure from associations like the powerful American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and against the backdrop of protests against police violence, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have decided to limit the possible uses of their face analysis tools, in particular by police.

The more this technology improves, the more it interests law enforcement and the more it worries defenders of the right to privacy.

In January 2020, an investigation by the New York Times lifted the veil on the Californian startup Clearview AI, financed in particular by one of the first investors of Facebook, Peter Thiel, which could, according to the prestigious American daily, "put an end to life private ".

- 3 billion images gleaned -

Its founder, Australian thirties Hoan Ton-That, claimed to have saved more than 3 billion images gleaned from social networks, and to be able to search from a simple photo directly on a smartphone.

According to the company, 600 police forces around the world are already among the users.

Twitter, Facebook, Youtube (Google) or LinkedIn (Microsoft) then hastened to condemn this exploitation of the images of their users and ordered Clearview AI to delete this data, without success for the moment.

According to a count made in December by journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril, on behalf of the organization Algorithm Watch, at least 10 police forces in Europe are already using facial recognition, without having to resort to the big names on the internet.

"I have never seen a contract between Microsoft, Amazon or IBM and the police in the investigations that I made on the subject", he explains to AFP, nuancing the effect of the announcements of these three companies on the development of facial recognition for security purposes.

"The tools to recognize faces are freely available", and supplied to the police by other service providers such as Briefcam, a Canon subsidiary specializing in ultra-fast image analysis and one of the leaders in market in Europe, he adds.

China, where facial recognition is developing in all directions with the blessing of the government, is also at work to export its technology, in particular to Africa via the telecommunications giant Huawei.

"We can establish the identity card of each without knowing it, with name, first name, education, experience, family, what he prefers, where he travels," said in February 2019 a regional manager of the firm during of the first 100% technological African fair dedicated to safety and security, in Rabat, Morocco.

- common network in Europe -

In February, a report obtained by the information site The Intercept also revealed that 10 police forces on the European continent were thinking about setting up a common network to search for faces, notably by extending exchange agreements already in place on other biometric data such as DNA or fingerprints.

In France, the White Paper on internal security from the Ministry of the Interior, expected in the coming weeks, should suggest some new avenues and in particular field experiments.

If French investigators are already authorized to use the algorithms to search for faces among those recorded in the TAJ file (processing of criminal records), they would also like to be able to use this technology with the 580,000 portraits of the RPF (files of wanted persons), including the famous S. files

But officials do not hide that they would also like to go further, and use facial recognition in public space in real time for targeted actions (terrorist attack, kidnapping of children, search for murderers, disappearance of vulnerable persons) .

According to an official of the Ministry of the Interior, who calls for a public debate on the subject, "we can imagine an experience in stations, deployed in the event of a murderous journey or to secure major events, and see if we arrest people thanks to this".

© 2020 AFP