European lawmakers are building an international facial recognition system that will include millions of people's photos. This will allow facial recognition on an unprecedented scale. For the past 15 years, police forces in Europe who were searching for criminals could share fingerprints, DNA samples, details of the vehicle owners etc. If the officials in France are looking for a suspect in Spain, they could ask the Spanish forces to run a fingerprint test against their database. The introduction of facial recognition to this system will make it more efficient.  

The expansion of facial recognition will provide greater scope for policing across the continent. It comes under Prum II data-sharing proposal. Even though the details of the plans were announced in December, criticism from European regulators has gotten louder in recent weeks, as the full impact of the plans was not understood. 

Ella Jakubowska, a policy advisor at WIRED magazine, revealed how nations pushed for facial recognition to be included in the international policing agreement. Seven European countries first signed an iteration of Prum in 2005. The countries were Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Austria. Prum II plans to expand the information that can be shared, potentially including photos and information from licenses. In addition, the inclusion of facial images and the ability to run facial recognition tests against them are planned changes in Prum II.  

In recent times facial recognition technology has received a pushback since it has misidentified people and derailed lives. Many cities in the US have banned police forces from using this technology. Presently the European Union is debating the adoption of this technology as part of its AI act.  

Prum II allows retrospective facial recognition. Police can compare still images from CCTVs cameras, social media, or those on a victim's phone against mug shots held on their database. The technology is different from live facial recognition systems linked to cameras in public places. 

The European proposal allows a nation to compare a photo against the databases of other countries. One document obtained by EDRi states that the number of matches could range between 10 and 100 faces; however, this figure is yet to be finalized. According to Jakubowska, while critics of facial recognition systems have primarily focused on real-time systems, those that identify people at a later date are still problematic. As a result, she stated that only the images of suspects could be shared, and the faces of the general population would not be used.  

The official proposal said that the people's faces shouldn't be combined on one giant central database. However, the police forces are linked together through a "central router". The European Commission spokesperson added that this router would only act as a message broker as it will not store any data. This will make the system more decentralized. 

One of the biggest problems for Jakubowska is how Prum II could normalize the use of facial recognition by police forces across Europe. The EU will pay the cost of connecting databases to Prum II as per the proposal.