The European Parliament adopted on Wednesday the Artificial Intelligence Act with 499 votes in favor, 28 against, and 93 abstentions. The new set of rules seeks to ensure that AI technology, developed and used in Europe, aligns with the bloc's norms and values, "including human oversight, safety, privacy, transparency, non-discrimination, and social and environmental wellbeing."
As per the adopted Act, the body expanded its list of banned activities to include remote biometric identification systems; biometric categorization systems using sensitive characteristics (gender, race, ethnicity); predictive policing systems; emotion recognition methods in police and security services; and the untargeted harvesting of facial images from the Internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases.
The parliament also approved the inclusion in the high-risk list the systems used to influence voters, the outcome of elections, and recommendation systems used by social media platforms (with more than 45 million users).
