European Union: Passed AI Act including data protection measures for "high-risk" AI systems by EU Parliament

On 13 March 2024, the European Parliament passed the regulation laying down harmonised rules on Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). The AI Act is based on a risk-based management approach and introduces data protection obligations depending on the level of risk associated with the AI system. The Act includes a ban on cognitive behavioural manipulation, the untargeted scrapping of facial images from the internet, social scoring, biometric categorisation to infer sensitive data, such as sexual orientation or religious beliefs, and some cases of predictive policing for individuals. Further, the Act establishes certain data governance practices for training and testing data, such as the fact that they should be relevant, accurate, and sufficiently representative. The Act now goes to the Council for the final vote.