World Movement Conversation: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Surveillance Challenges to Pro-Democracy Advocates

Today I joined an interesting live discussion (World Movement Conversation: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Surveillance Challenges to Pro-Democracy Advocates) organized by World Movement for Democracy. 

Andrej Petrovski , the Director of Tech/CERT at SHARE Foundation has provided insights about how AI surveillance challenges to pro-democracy advocates.

In the meeting, Petrovski talked about the book titled “Beyond the Face: Biometrics and Society” one of the editors of which is himself. This book provides comprehensive legal background information and practices of different countries concerning AI surveillance.

Some of the key terms explained in the book published by the SHARE Foundation are as follows:

“Artificial intelligence (AI)— the ability to perceive, analyse and understand information by machines, which can be applied to autonomously perform tasks in different fields, such as speech recognition, computer vision or natural language processing.

Biometrics — an umbrella term to refer to the field, the measurement of features to turn them into biometric data, and/or the subsequent processing of biometric or biometrics-based data.

Biometric data — personally-identifying data relating to someone’s face, body, or other physical or physiological characteristics (face, gait, etc.), usually that have been processed into a machine-readable format (template) with some connection to a person’s identity. Some jurisdictions, such as the EU, state that the data must be able to “allow or confirm” a person’s unique identity in order to be biometric (for example, a template of a person’s face) and are only sensitive when used for the “purpose” of unique identification.

Biometric features — the physical and physiological features (face, eye, voice) before they have been processed to generate the biometric or biometrics-based data.” (page 7)."