New RESOURCE PAGE helps supporters BAN biometric mass surveillance

Democratic action and empowerment of individuals and collectives sit at the core of EDRi’s campaigns. Following this principle, the Reclaim Your Face collective has put together a brand new Resource Page, helping all activists spread the word and take action easily, online, offline – at all times, wherever they are.

The new pool of tools is the go-to source for anyone wanting to support our fight against biometric mass surveillance. 

The knowledge and examples can be used for great discussions during your Christmas dinner, while stickers and posters can be a great way of engaging your new neighbour or a stranger in a bar.

What makes this page great? It is both an action pack, a media library and an explainer page at the same time. 

In this pool, you can find templates for printing your own stickers, posters, leaflets, letters to send to your local politicians, videos of Reclaim Your Face organisers giving interviews in many different languages.

Furthermore, you can also find short explainers for the most notorious five types of biometric mass surveillance: general monitoring, predictive policing, government databases, biometrics at borders/in humanitarian aid and social media scraping. We’ve added definitions for each, examples from EU countries, as well as reports and studies.

Here’s a sneak-a-peek:

• General Monitoring which is the use of surveillance devices to spy on every person in a generalised manner. The easiest way to picture how it happens, are the cameras in the public space. One example of this happened in the German city of Cologne where hundreds of thousands of people have been placed under biometric surveillance outside LGBTQ+ venues, places of worship and doctors’ surgeries.
•  Predictive Policing, which is is the practice of using historical data to predict things about future crime by applying algorithms. The Italian case in the city of Como shows perfectly how it works: authorities deploying biometric surveillance systems to identify ‘loitering’ in a park in which stranded migrants were forced to sleep after being stopped at the Swiss-Italian border.
•  Government Databases that collect data by making it necessary for people to submit their sensitive biometric data in order to get an identity card. In some countries, these identity cards are even essential for accessing public services. Such is the case of Poland that people as young as 12 are required to submit this data.
•  Borders and humanitarian instance, in which migrants are targets of experimentation with this tech. A well-known example was found in Greece, where the European Commission funded a notorious project called iBorderCTRL. The project used artificial intelligence and emotion recognition to predict whether people in immigration interviews are lying or not.
• Social media scraping, which is the process of gathering and processing data automatically right from our social media… even if you don’t have an account on that platform! The most known case is the one from Clearview AI, which counts with a 3 billion photo database. 

The resource page is an ever-growing effort. Share widely, show us how you’ve used these tools and let us know if you want to become a volunteer by writing to us at

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