Gendarmerie nationale

One of two records (Police nationale and Gendarmerie nationale) for French use of NEO handheld facial recognition; the account below covers both forces.

French police and gendarmerie officers carry handheld devices, branded NEO (nouvel equipement operationnel), that run facial recognition software developed by the German company Cognitec, matching photographs taken in the field against the TAJ criminal records database. Facial matching became available on these devices from 2025; a desktop version had existed since 2022.

TAJ (Traitement des Antecedents Judiciaires) holds around 17 million records on arrested and accused individuals, 48 million on victims, and roughly 9 million frontal photographs, operated by the Ministry of the Interior. Queries against it rose from 375,000 in 2019 to nearly 1 million by 2024.

An investigation by the non-profit outlet Disclose, published in partnership with La Quadrature du Net in March 2026, found the database being used for real-time identity checks on public streets, which the French Code of Criminal Procedure does not permit: TAJ may only be used by specially authorised officers during an investigation, not for on-the-spot verification. Disclose spoke to six individuals in Paris, Marseille and Lyon photographed by police in the preceding four years, in some cases without consent, including one person scanned at a pro-Palestinian protest in Paris. A 2023 report from the police's own internal inspectorate, the IGPN, had already found the database was 'very frequently used on public streets during identity checks'.

The Gendarmerie disputes the characterisation. An editorial in its own newspaper, L'Essor de la Gendarmerie, states the tool is limited to criminal investigations, identity checks where a person lacks or refuses identification, and intelligence gathering, describing its purpose as an investigative aid rather than mass surveillance. An internal memo states that results 'must be carefully reviewed by users' and 'must not be considered as evidence'. The Gendarmerie states access is restricted to judicially authorised officers, excluding volunteer deputy gendarmes and reservists. TAJ is monitored by the French data protection authority CNIL, and the Gendarmerie introduced an internal monitoring tool called Citar in December 2025 intended to reduce unauthorised access.

La Quadrature du Net, which has previously and unsuccessfully sued over French police use of facial recognition, argues there is no legislation specifying how the technology may be used, by whom, or under what oversight, and that equipping thousands of officers with it amounts to surveillance authorised by the state without a legal framework. This site records a genuine dispute between an internal memo describing careful, restricted use and independent reporting describing frequent use outside the permitted legal basis, rather than resolving it.

Update, November 2026. Next (10 July 2026) reports, on the strength of the Disclose investigation, that about 230,000 NEO 2 smartphones used by police since 2022 and NeoGend devices used by gendarmes since 2020 can run the facial recognition app, which searches the GASPARD photo file; its interface says it may be used only in a judicial investigation. It reports that Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told the Senate on 1 April 2026 that use during identity checks is illegal and that he condemns it, and that a court in Valence acquitted eight protesters, reportedly because police had used facial recognition unlawfully. Both are as reported by Next, which credits Mediapart for its account of the Valence trial; Nuñez is quoted as saying: "Cette technique n'est pas légale".