Question 14143 — font

Summary

Mr. Édouard Bénard questions the Minister of the Interior on the large-scale deployment of facial recognition on law enforcement telephones and its use outside the legal framework provided for by the code of criminal procedure, in particular during identity check operations. In an article published on March 16, 2026, the investigative media Disclose reports an explosion in the number of TAJ consultations (data file). processing of criminal records) outside any legal framework since agents of the national police and the gendarmerie are equipped with telephones equipped with an application called NEO allowing a photographic comparison to be made with the aforementioned file. Created in 2014, the TAJ currently contains 17 million files on the people involved in an investigation as well as on 48 million victims, which poses a problem already in itself a political and ethical question given the massive nature of this registration of the population. Indeed, the TAJ contains, in addition to surnames, first names, dates of birth, addresses, professions and telephone contact details, particularly sensitive personal information, such as the political or religious affiliation of the people appearing in the file. According to a document from the general secretariat of the Ministry of the Interior consulted by Disclose, the TAJ contains 9 million full-face portraits. Although an instruction from the Ministry of the Interior relating to “consulting the TAJ application”, dated February 4, 2022, recalls that consulting the TAJ and the use of facial recognition during “an identity check operation” are prohibited, it appears that these instructions are largely ignored in practice. Thus, in his report activity for the year 2023, the IGPN indicates, on page 35, that the TAJ is “very frequently used on public roads during identity checks”. The authors of the report add that access to the file on NEO devices gives rise to “fear that the number of unjustified consultations will increase”. According to a document from the general secretariat of the Ministry of the Interior mentioned by the Disclose article, the operation of the TAJ, associated to facial recognition, has more than doubled in five years: from 375,000 consultations in 2019, it has increased to nearly a million in 2024, or an average of 2,500 daily consultations. The administration has equipped itself with the technical means to monitor the proper use of facial recognition, since each consultation or addition of a photograph to the TAJ is traced instantly and the information kept for a period of three years, in order to be able to identify the agent duly authorized to use facial recognition and to ensure that the file is consulted within the legal framework for which it was created. If the fraudulent use of the TAJ and facial recognition brings into play the professional liability of the agent, a feeling of impunity nevertheless seems to predominate among the agents equipped with NEO devices who can access the TAJ. Thus, Law enforcement officers have already been filmed, on television shows devoted to the police, using facial recognition thanks to NEO to check identities in the street, outside the defined legal framework. The media Disclose indicates that it has contacted the Ministry of the Interior to obtain details on the nature of the control of the use of the TAJ and facial recognition, as well as from the gendarmerie. THE two administrations reportedly indicated that they did not want to respond to the newspaper. In substance, the generalization of registration of the population within the framework of the TAJ, excluding convictions or criminal investigations in progress, as well as the trivialization of the use of facial recognition by the police in the context of identity control operations not necessarily based on objective elements, raise questions about the massive nature of registration of the population which deploys in the country claiming to be democratic. Databases containing biometric elements, particularly photographic elements, collected under particularly questionable conditions, raise fears of a shift towards a police state regime operating mass surveillance of the population. The Vichy regime, which relied in particular on police files as well as intelligence files generals constituted under the Third Republic, to carry out its policy of persecution of elements of the population that it considered undesirable, constitutes a heavy historical precedent that no one can ignore. Also, he asks him to take all necessary measures to supervise and above all more strictly control the use of facial recognition applications used by law enforcement. Likewise, he asks him to clarify whether the Government intends to reduce the retention period of data of crime victims appearing in the TAJ, currently set at 15 years, which paradoxically constitute the majority of the file.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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1. 7 April 2026

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• Édouard Bénard · auteur

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