Dr Catherine Jasserand wins privacy award for paper on facial recognition technologies

Catherine Jasserand , assistant professor at the Faculty of Law, has won one of the Privacy Papers for Policymakers Awards (PPPM) from the Future of Privacy Forum. She received the award for her paper ‘Experiments with Facial Recognition Technologies in Public Spaces: In Search of an EU Governance Framework’.

Testing facial recognition without specific legal rules

According to a study conducted by EDRi in 2020, at least 15 European countries have already used or experimented with facial recognition technologies (FRTs) in public places without much public debate. The systems operate remotely without people cooperating or being aware of them.

Based on the experiments conducted, the paper 'Experiments with Facial Recognition Technologies in Public Spaces: In Search of an EU Governance Framework' assesses whether data protection frameworks are adequate to regulate FRT experiments conducted by public authorities in public spaces. The paper is a chapter of the book ‘Handbook on the Politics and Governance of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence’ and was written in 2022 as part of her fellowship MSCA-IF DATAFACE at KU Leuven. Andrej Zwitter and Oskar Gstrein from the UG (Campus Fryslân) are the editors of the book.

PPPM Awards

The PPPM Awards recognize leading privacy science relevant to policymakers in the U.S. Congress, federal agencies and international data protection authorities. This year, the advisory board selected nine winning articles, two honorable mentions, two student entries and two honorable student mentions.

This article was published by the Faculty of Law.