Summer 2023, for the last trilogue phase we built a new campaign! targeting the Council of Europe.




European Parlament Vote Done!

This website would be updated to face the next phase; At the moment the contest are suspended, and the target would be refocus.

Act VOTE day: everyone has the right to be protected by invasive surveillance technology. Here’s how to test RBI algorithms on MEPs

Will the European Parliament ban face surveillance technologies used by police and private companies in public spaces?

Face recognition in public spaces, as well as the categorisation of people’s emotions, gender and ethnicity, erodes freedom of assembly, enables discrimination, and sets a precedent — opening the door to future human rights violations

Members of the European Parliament are considering banning some of these harmful practices

This campaign aims to ensure that NOBODY can use face surveillance technologies in public spaces

Not in real-time, not later on using public footage. Not using images scraped from the internet. Never: forbidden forever

We will run a few experiments to let European decision-makers better comprehend the issues they have the power to halt

What if the AI Act fails to ban face recognition and categorisation in public? Let’s see! We have collected all the MEPs’ faces and analysed them with software currently available to anyone

Similarly to how the surveillance data market examines individuals’ faces for ’enrichment,’ you can explore the Open Data Faces 🤩, access the openly released data, and apply AI attribution models to gain insights

It’s neither reliable nor accurate, and it’s likely to lead to discrimination. But that has not stopped companies and governments from using these systems against us

To effectively simulate the unethical data market, we’ve also launched a contest. The winner will be the wildest, scariest, or most original data ‘enrichment’

🥇 🥈 🥉
200€ 100€ Honorable
mention

DeepFakes are also a modern problem. We can’t avoid that they might be produced, but if legitimized, massive biometry system like pimeyes or clearview would incorporate the false information to the victim profile. With no control or awareness for the affected citizen

It summarize why there is a second contest, about producing the most surprising MEP DeepFake

🥇 🥈 🥉
200€ 100€ Honorable
mention

You can help this campaign in different ways. If you want to help ban face recognition, emotion recognition and face categorisation consider the following options to get involved

Right now, the prizes are small, but they will grow through donations

To participate in the contests, you need to send a tweet mentioning @HermesCenter and using hashtag #dontspyeu

If you’re producing a tool, add a link. If you’re producing a picture, mention the original MEP. See more details in Open Data Faces, and FakeFace pages

Needless to say, we’ll stop the campaign if the European Parliament will permanently bans all these types of face surveillance

We’ll assign the prizes based on the sum of retweets and favorites, when the campaign finishes, or at the end of May at the latest