Oh great, the EU has ditched its facial recognition ban

“But the security community is against the ban because they think it’s a good tool.”The new draft does give individual member states the power to impose prohibitions on the technology as they see fit — but they have thus far been reluctant to do this.There have only been a few exceptions, including data protection authorities in France and Sweden, which ruled that uses of such software in schools was illegal. Both authorities found that the projects violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which states that biometric data is prohibited from processing — unless it meets a range of exceptional circumstances.[Read: Here’s how face recognition tech can be GDPR compliant]This led the UK’s data watchdog to rule to allow police to use facial recognition CCTV, as it met “the threshold of strict necessity for law enforcement purposes.”The UK is one of range of nations that are accelerating their deployments of facial recognition.