Real-time remote biometric identification
Real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement purposes is, as a general rule, prohibited. It may exceptionally be permitted for three exhaustively listed purposes — such as averting a terrorist threat — but only where the Member State has enacted enabling national legislation and prior judicial or independent administrative authorisation has been obtained for each individual use.
The prohibition and its narrow exception regime are set out in Article 5(1)(h) and (2)–(7), read together with Annex II and Articles 27 and 49. The prohibition applies only to real-time identification, in public spaces, for law-enforcement purposes — retrospective (non-real-time) identification, or similar activity carried out by private individuals or companies, may fall under other rules (e.g. the prohibition on untargeted facial scraping in Article 5(1)(e), or the GDPR). The three exhaustively listed authorising purposes are the search for victims of crime, averting a specific, substantial and imminent threat to life or physical safety, and the localisation or identification of a suspect or perpetrator of certain serious criminal offences. This category affects only state law-enforcement actors — it practically never arises for a Hungarian SME.
This category effectively affects only state law-enforcement actors; it does not present a real risk in the ordinary business activity of a Hungarian SME.
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Start freeRelated terms
- Prohibited AI practiceArticle 5(1) prohibits eight AI practices outright: subliminal or deceptive manipulation, exploitation of vulnerabilities, social scoring, predicting criminal offending from profiling alone, untargeted scraping of facial images, emotion recognition in the workplace and education, biometric categorisation to infer protected characteristics, and real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces. There is no compliance pathway for these.
- Biometric categorisationA biometric categorisation system that individually categorises natural persons based on their biometric data in order to infer their race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation is prohibited. The prohibition targets inference of protected characteristics.
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