Short Film “Reclaim Your Face”: the harms of Biometric Mass Surveillance to society

‘Biometric Mass Surveillance pose a danger to society’ is the main message of Alexander Lehmann’s latest short film. And there is no better place to premier this movie than at the last Chaos Computer Club’s end of the year event rC3. 

The film Reclaim Your Face highlights the issues surrounding biometric mass surveillance and underlines the harms that its’ systems pose to our society. The movie is available online in multiple languages (English, German, Italian, Danish & more) and under CC BY 4.0 license (which means you can share it freely!).

During the whole event, Reclaim Your Face had a strong presence beyond the movie: there were also four talks about and around the initiative which we think you would enjoy.*

1. “Reclaim Your Face! The European Citizens Initiative for a ban on biometric mass surveillance“: during the panel, multiple partner organisations share the latest updates of the campaign in the last year. [watch here]
2. “Stop Cameras!”: The Cologne initiative and Reclaim Your Face partner Kameras Stoppen (Stop Cameras) is directed against police video surveillance in Cologne. Watch the video to learn more about the campaign in terms of successes and current status. [watch here]
3. “Ask the surveillance state“: As a Reclaim Your Face action, snoopy and kantorkel submitted a whole series of freedom of information requests to various authorities in Germany. In this talk, they give an overview of victories and failures. The requests are generally about video surveillance in Germany, facial recognition in the context of G20 in Hamburg, a Berlin zoo and the transfer of biometric data to a research institution. [watch here]
4. “Surveillance camera mapping as counter defense”: Techniques of biometric surveillance can be retrofitted to existing surveillance cameras with little effort. For this reason, it is important to create a database of existing surveillance cameras that is up-to-date as much as possible. This presentation will give an introduction to the unsurv project that is developing tools to simplify and automate the mapping of surveillance cameras. [watch here]

If you liked this selection of biometric mass surveillance talks, check out the Reclaim Your Face website now and sign the ECI to ban biometric mass surveillance in Europe.

(Contribution by: Matthias Marx, EDRi member, Chaos Computer Club)

*(All talks have been translated from German to English or vice versa.)