Via NOS
The Netherlands Data Protection Authority (DPA, or Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, AP) have looked into the illegitimate use of facial recognition technologies by Dutch holiday parks. Eight out of the eight parks investigated have indeed used such technology to allow or deny individuals access to park swimming pools or playgrounds.
The use of facial recognition technologies in the Netherlands is strictly regulated. In the cases of these holiday parks, there was a clear breech of those rules. Seven out of these eight have by now changed their ways, one still hasn’t by the time of the AP press release.
Yet another instance of software sorting to modulate individualized access to services. Private services in this case but still all too readily ( and illegally) outsourced to ‘smart’ tech. Facial surveillance is not the only type of individualized (or perhaps more adequately ‘dividualized’’ in Deleuzian terms) authorization infrastructures for access and use of physical spaces. Gait, voice, retina, fingerprint, skin color and tone; the body is an access key for urban services today. We know that technologies have not, and likely still do not work well for everybody. Furthermore, what about the marginalized and sans-papiers who have reasons not to be datafied and knowable, and who will inevitably get locked out even more?