All-seeing eye in Western Europe? : The context, challenges and advantages of AI camera surveillance in Western Europe.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the potential benefits and challenges of AI camera surveillance, which could be an important a tool of Smart Cities. While AI cameras can gather data and improve the quality of life by ensuring more safety, there are also privacy, technological, and ethical concerns that need to be addressed. This qualitative study explores and identifies potential challenges for AI camera surveillance in Western Europe. Primary information is obtained through semi-structured interviews. The object of research were six experts, of which five come from the Netherlands and one lives in the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that AI camera surveillance is currently not allowed under European privacy legislation, more and more is being allowed under the guise of security. However, there is doubt whether AI camera surveillance leads to more security, it could also provoke function creep. In order to ethically evaluate a new technology, there are two methods: measuring it to basic ethical values and asking for the opinion of people who have or will have to deal with the technology in question. Although the government does try to gauge the opinion of the citizens, these polls are not representative at all. New initiatives have been launched to gauge more representativeness among the population In addition to the privacy and ethical challenges, there are also technological challenges. One of these is accuracy issues, although almost anything and anyone can be recognised, there will always be a margin of error in the face recognition technology and this must be taken into account. There are also explainability issues, since the developers of the facial recognition technology do not know on the basis of which facial features a match has been found. This study highlights numerous potential challenges for AI camera surveillance in Western Europe, which should be taken into account when a government of a country from Western Europe decides to implement an AI camera surveillance system.