Under the new regulation, European citizens would be entitled to know when a company or government is using their data, with the goal of limiting “the indiscriminate use of facial recognition technology,” a senior official told The Financial Times.(Financial Times)

Talking point: The move is part of a larger overhaul in how artificial intelligence is regulated in Europe. It comes about a week after the news broke that London’s King’s Cross area was using facial recognition to monitor tens of thousands of people. At the time, the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office said it was looking into the use of such technology by police and private firms. Regulating the use of facial recognition would add additional protections to EU citizens’ privacy on top of its General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May 2018. It already forbids the collection of sensitive “biometric” data that can identify people, unless users give explicit consent.