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“We’re trying to turn CCTV cameras into powerful surveillance tools,” said Matthias Houllier, co-founder of Wintics, one of four French companies awarded the contract to deploy algorithms at the Olympics. “With thousands of cameras, police officers could [to react to every camera.]”
Wintix won its first public contract in Paris in 2020 to collect data on the number of cyclists in different parts of the city, helping Paris transport authorities plan to build more bike lanes. By connecting its algorithms to 200 existing traffic cameras, Wintix’s system (which is still operational) can first identify and then count cyclists in the middle of busy roads. When France announced it was looking for companies that could build algorithms to help improve security for this summer’s Olympics, Houllier saw it as a natural evolution. “The technology is the same,” he says. “It’s analyzing anonymous shapes in public spaces.”
After training its algorithms on both open-source and synthetic data, Wintics’ system has been adapted to count the number of people in a crowd, for example, or the number of people lying on the floor, and alert an operator when the numbers exceed a certain threshold.
“That’s it. There are no automated decisions,” Houllier explains. His team trains Interior Ministry officials on how to use the company’s software, and they decide how to deploy it, he says. “The idea is to get the operator’s attention so they can review and decide what to do.”
Houllier argues his algorithm is a privacy-friendly alternative to controversial facial recognition systems that have been used at past global sporting events, including the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Qatar World Cup“We’re trying to find a different way,” he says. For him, letting algorithms crawl security camera footage is a way to ensure the safety of events without endangering personal freedoms. “We’re not analyzing personal data. We’re not looking at faces or license plate recognition or behavioral analysis, we’re just looking at shapes.”
But privacy activists reject the idea that the technology protects people’s personal freedoms. In the 20th arrondissement, Noémie Levant, a member of the activist group La Quadrature du Net, has just received 6,000 posters that her group plans to distribute. The posters are designed to warn Parisians about the “algorithmic surveillance” that is taking over the city and urge them to reject “the authoritarian occupation of public spaces.” She rejects the idea that the algorithms don’t process personal data. “If you have an image of a person, you have to analyze all the data on the image, that is, the personal data, the biometric data,” she says. “It’s exactly the same technology as facial recognition. It’s exactly the same principle.”
Levan worries that AI surveillance systems will remain in France long after the athletes have left the country. For her, these algorithms allow police and security services to impose surveillance over large areas of a city. “This technology will reproduce police stereotypes,” she says. “We know that the police discriminate. We know that they always go to the same areas. They always attack the same people. And this technology, like any other surveillance technology, will help the police to do that.”
With drivers furious at security barriers blocking roads in the city center, Levan is one of many Parisians planning to flee to the south of France for the Olympics. But she worries about the city she will return to. “The Olympics is just an excuse,” she says. “The government, companies and police are already thinking about what happens after that.”
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