If you visit Nice, gateway to the glamorous French Riviera, you are being watched.
The Mediterranean resort, scene of a horrific terrorist attaack in 2016, has become what its mayor calls “the most monitored city in France” — and a laboratory for a global revolution in law enforcement, powered by artificial intelligence.
Some 4,200 cameras are deployed in public spaces, one for every 81 residents. Some are equipped with thermal imaging and other sensors. They are connected to a command center and AI technology that can flag minor infractions — when someone parks illegally or enters a public park after hours — as well as potentially suspicious activity, such as someone trying to access a school building.
The city has tested facial recognition software so accurate that it can tell the difference between identical twins.
Another system used algorithms capable of flagging irregular vehicle and pedestrian movements in real time — something officials here say could have rapidly alerted police to the assailant who drove a 19-ton truck into a crowd on a seafront promenade in 2016, killing 86 people and wounding hundreds more.
“There are people who have declared war on us, and we cannot win the war using the weapons of peace,” said Mayor Christian Estrosi said. “Artificial Intelligence is the most protective weapon we have.”
France is moving to deploy sweeping algorithmic video surveillance as it prepares to host the 2024 Olympics, including technology that can detect sudden crowd movements, abandoned objects and someone lying on the ground. Officials say such technology could be key to thwarting an attack like the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
The embrace of futuristic policing is running into challenges in a region that is seeking to take the lead on AI regulation and is home to some of the strongest digital privacy protections. “They are putting us all under the all-seeing eye of AI,” said Félix Tréguer of La Quadrature du Net, a French digital civil rights group.
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