France to run facial recognition on social media images to identify riot suspects

French Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin announced that facial recognition would be used to compare a police database of mugshots with images posted on social media, to identify suspects in the looting and violence of the previous weekend’s unrest, France 24 reported Oct. 20. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu ordered more than 200 investigators onto the cases, and a Paris police unit is working from 80,000 security cameras and videos on TikTok, Instagram and Discord, per France 24. Police use of facial recognition for forensic identification is set out in French law, Biometric Update reported, adding that France’s data protection authority, CNIL, ruled after a 2024 investigation that the gendarmerie had deployed BriefCam facial recognition in public without approval or completed data protection impact assessments.