Olympics’ AI Security Stokes Backlash Over Mass Surveillance
The Paris Summer Olympics that begin Friday include among the most public and controversial rollouts ever of algorithmic video surveillance, an AI event-security technology that uses machine learning to analyze video footage in real time to detect—and even predict—threats and other anomalies.
In Paris, video cameras around the city will watch millions of visitors to detect weapons or people moving against the crowds, among other things that could be seen as a precursors to an attack. Security personnel will then decide whether to notify authorities including local and national police.
While French lawmakers call the tool a security measure aimed at shielding the multi-week event from violence, privacy advocates on both sides of the Atlantic have sounded alarms.
“The things that these tools are supposed to achieve are something like those pre-cognitive efforts from that Tom Cruise movie some years ago,” University of California, Irvine law professor Ari Ezra Waldman said, referencing the sci-fi 2002 film Minority Report.
