New data-sharing proposals in Europe push for the expansion of facial recognition and to allow police forces across the EU to link their photo databases
Lawmakers advance proposals to let police forces across the EU link their photo databases—which include millions of pictures of people's faces.
Context & Ripple Effects
This proposal is the operational follow-through on a paper trail that has been building since 2019: an internal EU report circulated among national officials called for exactly this — a network of linked national police facial recognition databases (the 2020 Intercept report) — and it rides on interconnection work already voted through for border, migration, and law-enforcement systems covering hundreds of millions of people (the 2019 interconnection vote).
What makes the timing awkward is the political counter-current: Parliament passed a non-binding resolution against police facial recognition in late 2021, and by May 2023 lawmakers had agreed to ban public-space facial recognition and predictive policing in the AI Act (the May 2023 agreement). The security apparatus is wiring the databases together while the legislature moves to restrict how they can be used.
First-order effects
- National police forces across the EU would gain the ability to search each other's photo databases — millions of stored face images become queryable cross-border rather than confined to national silos.
- The proposal directly advances the agenda laid out in the 2020 internal report, moving it from a circulated recommendation into active lawmaker consideration.
Second-order effects
- The linking plan collides head-on with the AI Act track: negotiators who agreed to ban public facial recognition must now decide whether a shared police photo network is lawful infrastructure or exactly what the ban was meant to prevent.
- Biometric-matching vendors and systems integrators gain a large, standardized procurement market as member states are pushed toward interoperable database formats.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the EU's real policy fight shifts from whether police can use facial recognition to what populations end up inside the linked databases — with the security build-out outpacing the restrictions meant to govern it.
- A functioning cross-border face-search network would be hard to unwind even under a final AI Act ban on live public-space use, entrenching retrospective, database-driven identification as the accepted form.
The trend: Europe's biometric infrastructure is being interconnected faster than its political institutions can agree on limits, making database-linked police identification a de facto reality ahead of any final legal settlement.