A fuss at the disco

“There can be no recognition of foreigners”

Allegedly, a native Kosovar was filtered out as a "foreigner" by a surveillance camera.(Bild: Einöder Horst)

There was a big fuss in a disco because a native Kosovar, who is now an Austrian citizen, was refused entry. The bouncer talked about camera surveillance, but the JKU researcher waved it off: such "foreigner recognition" is technically impossible.

"One of my friends told me that a bouncer asked me to leave because the camera recognized me as a foreigner! The bouncer also confirmed this to me," says Bardhoku Gazmend (33) from Zeillern about his failed visit to a disco in Amstetten (Lower Austria). The electrical engineer, who was born in Kosovo but is an Austrian citizen, is now claiming 3,000 euros in damages for discrimination with his lawyer Hubert Niedermayr from Steyr - we reported.

A racist surveillance system - does it really exist? 
The operator vehemently denies the existence of such a system in his disco. We wanted to know whether it is technically possible, at least in theory, and asked René Mayrhofer, Institute Director and Head of the LIT Secure and Correct Systems Lab and Head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Private Digital Authentication in the Physical World (CDL Digidow) at Johannes Kepler University in Linz.

"Depends on the passport"
"In principle, highly qualified user software can already recognize a lot with the help of biometrics, whether facial recognition, fingerprints, iris scans or even DNA. However, whether someone is an Austrian or a foreigner depends on their passport and not on their genetic profile. In view of the fact that there are many people with different genetic origins in Austria, it is simply impossible to differentiate between people based on their appearance," says the researcher.

Artificial intelligence can be told what to filter. How it implements this is then the question.

René Mayrhofer, Institutsvorstand, Forscher der JKU

Would it even be legal?
Artificial intelligence can be easily trained to recognize patterns, but the error rate should not be underestimated. Mayrhofer himself naturally rejects such racist surveillance options, and it is questionable whether it would even be legal to use them.