On November 23rd, 2022 an article by Le Parisien, a French Newspaper, revealed that the French Government had dropped its project to deploy facial recognition to support security arrangements at the 2024 Paris Olympics. In fact, the debate on the possible implementation of facial recognition systems during the Olympic Games is part of a broader debate which divides political leaders on whether AI-driven biometric systems should be used to monitor public places.

The French DPA, CNIL, stressed that “the current debate on facial recognition is sometimes distorted by a poor grasp of this technology and how it works”. This 2nd of 6 Reports of our MAPFRE series provides a path to understanding with a classification table presenting in the most accessible way the different facial processing functionalities and applications used in public spaces.