Vidéosurveillance algorithmique (VSA) analyses camera feeds for patterns associated with crowd risk, things like a sudden crowd surge, someone moving against the flow of a crowd, or an abandoned object, and flags them for a human operator to assess, rather than identifying individuals. France's Olympics law creating this category of surveillance explicitly excluded facial recognition and other biometric identification from what the algorithm was permitted to do, a distinction its supporters point to and its critics regard as one that could erode over time.

Its legal status since the Olympics has genuinely not settled into a single clear answer, which is itself worth knowing rather than glossing over: the original authorisation expired on schedule in March 2025, and reporting since then diverges on what happened next; see the tracker entry for the specifics and the conflicting sources. France was the first EU country to legalise algorithmic video surveillance at this scale, which makes its legal trajectory a reasonable indicator of where other EU states weighing similar systems may end up.