French Data Protection Authority Rejects Age-Estimating Cameras in Tobacco Shops

The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), France’s data protection authority, has deemed the use of “augmented” cameras in tobacco shops to assess customers’ ages as “neither necessary nor proportionate.” This decision was published in an opinion released on Friday, July 11th.

These cameras, equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) software, are used in the context of selling products prohibited to minors, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling. Such age estimation tools based on facial analysis are increasingly common for verifying whether a person is of legal age, most often for accessing online services for adults.

These devices have been deployed in tobacco shops for several years as part of various trials. At the end of 2024, the Paris-Île-de-France Federation of Tobacconists, for example, announced that it had launched an experiment in 14 establishments. “Following several requests,” the CNIL assessed the compliance of these devices with French law and the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ruled against them.

Disproportionate Processing

“The prior analysis of people’s faces by a camera to estimate their age does not appear necessary,” the authority stated in its opinion, as checking identification documents remains the only way to ensure the majority of customers. These devices are also considered disproportionate because the cameras continuously record and process images of customers visiting the tobacco shop. In addition, the CNIL emphasizes that the “deployment [of these tools] in living spaces such as tobacco shops contributes to a risk of trivialization and habituation to a form of surveillance reinforced by the proliferation of such tools.”

The authority clarified that “in the absence of complaints from concerned individuals, to date, the CNIL wishes to allow the tobacconists concerned time to comply.” The National Confederation of Tobacconists responded that it “takes note” of the Commission’s opinion and will comment on the matter in the coming days.

The Alliance Against Tobacco welcomed this opinion. “The deployment of age verification devices in tobacco shops is in no way a satisfactory response to the non-compliance with the ban on the sale of tobacco and vaping products to minors,” it argued.

With AFP

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