Costa News Spain Breaking News | English News in Spain.
SPAIN’S airport company has been hit with a €10 million fine for installing facial recognition cameras intended to speed up boarding.
These cameras took pictures of passengers’ faces before they stepped foot onto planes – they formed part of a biometric boarding process implemented by airport company Aena.
The Agencia Española de Proteccion de Datos (AEPD) has now hit Aena with a fine that amounts to €10,043,002, according to El Confidencial.
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The AEPD concluded Aena’s systems of biometric identification were implemented without Evaluacion de Impacto en Proteccion de Datos, meaning they did not conform to the general rules for data protection in the nation.
The biometric systems were used to collect data at the security gates, bag drop-offs, and boarding gates. Passengers were asked to volunteer, give their information and take their picture.
Now, a temporary suspension of the process has been ordered. Traditional identity verification systems can continue to take place.
In response to the fine, Aena told the media on Tuesday that ‘it respectfully disagrees with the sanction imposed by AEPD both on substantive and procedural grounds’.
Aena is going to present this opinion in court despite the AEPD insisting the company didn’t comply with the formal obligation to prepare an EIPD ahead of the programme’s start.
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The AEPD stated that Aena’s digital system which was part their strategic plan from 2022-2026 for a more efficient airport traffic did not meet data protection regulations.
The AEPD also confirms that Aena, which is chaired by Maurici Lucena, was aware that this system had high risk implications during its Menorca and Madrid pilots – they had even consulted the agency on two occasions about how best to process data.
Aena allegedly did not do a good enough job of analyzing the risk impact and, as a result, AEPD claims that Aena should have stopped expanding its pilot project, including to Barcelona airport.
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On the contrary, Aena guaranteed that it has not breached security, gone through the users’ data, or transferred information to a third party, stating that ‘the custody of this data has not been at risk at any moment’.
Highlighting the voluntary aspect of the system, Aena insists that it has respected Spain’s data protection rules and aims to ‘restart the programme as soon as possible’.
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