Policy Observatory

Julia Reda: Without cryptography, every email you send and every word you type into a form on a website can easily be intercepted, read and even modified. Encryption is essential to protect the integrity of the communications of individuals and businesses in Europe.

And in the light of the abject failure of the European Union to stop the mass surveillance of its people politically, it is the best available (though unsatisfactory) way to safeguard our rights.

The Dutch police has a facial recognition database containing "well over a million" faces of people taken into temporary detention (and consequently in the "strafrechtdatabase"). According to the news source, police ran approximately one thousand suspects through it, which led to 93 hits. There are at least three humans involved in the process as safeguarding measure: one before a photograph is fed through the algorithm to look at consider aspects such as the quality of the picture. Two humans are checking the results of the automated process. Furthermore, a hit is seen as in "indication" of someone's identity, not as definite proof.