The following AI practices shall be prohibited:
the placing on the market, the putting into service for this specific purpose, or the use of AI systems that create or expand facial recognition databases through the untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage;
Several cumulative conditions must be fulfilled for the prohibition in Article 5(1)(e) AI Act to apply:
The practice must constitute the ‘placing on the market’, ‘the putting into service for this specific purpose’ or the ‘use’ of an AI system;
for the purpose of creating or expanding facial recognition databases;
the means to populate the database are through AI tools for untargeted scraping; and
the sources of the images are either from the internet or CCTV footage.
For the prohibition to apply all four conditions must be simultaneously fulfilled. The first element of placing on the market, putting into service or use of the AI system has been already analysed in section 2.3. The prohibition, therefore, applies to both providers and deployers of AI systems, each within their respective responsibilities, not to place on the market, put into service or use such AI systems. The specific criteria related to the prohibition of untargeted scraping are further described and analysed below. The prohibition applies to scraping tools that are placed on the market or being put into service ‘for this specific purpose’ of untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage. This implies that the prohibition does not apply to any scraping tool with which a database for face recognition may be constructed or expanded, but only to tools for untargeted scraping.