“What we are doing is turning CCTV cameras into a powerful monitoring tool,” says Matthias Houllier, co-founder of Wintics, one of four French companies that won contracts to deploy their algorithms at the Olympics. “With thousands of cameras, it is impossible for police officers (to react to each one).”
Wintics won its first public contract in Paris in 2020, collecting data on the number of cyclists in different parts of the city to help Paris transport officials in their plan to build more bike lanes. By connecting its algorithms to 200 existing traffic cameras, Wintics’ system, which is still in operation, is able to first identify and then count cyclists in the middle of busy streets. When France announced it was looking for companies that could develop algorithms to help improve safety at this summer’s Olympics, Houllier saw this as a natural evolution. “The technology is the same,” he says. “It’s analyzing anonymous shapes in public spaces.”
After training their algorithms on synthetic and open-source data, Wintics’ systems have been adapted to, for example, count the number of people in a crowd or the number of people falling to the ground, alerting operators once the number exceeds a certain threshold.
“That’s right. There is no automatic decision,” Houllier explains. His team trained Interior Ministry officials to learn how to use the company’s software and they decide how they want to implement it, he says. “The idea is to get the operator’s attention, so they can double-check and decide what needs to be done.”
Houllier says his algorithms are a privacy-friendly alternative to controversial facial recognition systems used at previous global sporting events, such as the 2022 tournament. Qatar World Cup“We are trying to find another way,” he says. For him, letting algorithms crawl through CCTV footage is a way to ensure the event is safe without jeopardising personal freedoms. “We are not analysing any personal data. We are just looking at shapes, no faces, no licence plate recognition, there is no behavioural analysis.”
Privacy activists, however, reject the idea that the technology protects people’s personal freedoms. In the 20th arrondissement, Noémie Levain, a member of the activist group La Quadrature du Net, has just received a shipment of 6,000 posters that the group plans to distribute, designed to warn her fellow Parisians about the “algorithmic surveillance” taking over their city and to urge them to reject the “authoritarian capture of public spaces.” She rejects the idea that algorithms are not processing personal data. “When you have images of people, you have to analyze all the data in the image, which is personal data, which is biometric data,” she says. “It’s exactly the same technology as facial recognition. It’s exactly the same principle.”
Levain is concerned that AI surveillance systems will remain in France long after the athletes leave. She sees these algorithms as allowing police and security services to enforce surveillance over larger areas of the city. “This technology will reproduce the stereotypes of the police,” she says. “We know they discriminate. We know they always go to the same area. They always go and harass the same people. And this technology, like any other surveillance technology, will help them do that.”
As motorists protest in the city centre against security barriers blocking the streets, Levain is one of many Parisians planning to leave for the south of France while the Olympics are taking place. But she worries about the city that will welcome her back. “The Olympics are an excuse,” she says. “They – the government, the companies, the police – are already thinking about what comes next.”
