Spanish National Police

ABIS includes a facial recognition component that searches an image captured in connection with an offence against police records of detained people and returns possible candidates, which specialists then verify manually. In a written answer dated 8 February 2023 to a question by deputies Ismael Cortés Gómez and Enrique Santiago Romero, the Government described the tool's purpose as identifying people involved in criminal offences, said ABIS results from adapting the earlier SAID file, already authorised by the data protection agency, to Organic Law 7/2021, set out retention of up to 20 years for records of detained people, reported accuracy tests of the cogent_004 software, and said the new software does not allow comparisons between already known images; it stated that "no se aplican decisiones automatizadas por la herramienta sin intervención y supervisión humana". El País (28 May 2024, republished by DPL News) reports, citing Interior Ministry sources, that the system was put into operation in August 2023, that it had been used in at least 400 investigations with positive results in about 40 per cent of them, and that the Policía Nacional had 11 stations (two in Madrid and one in each of nine other cities, with another planned for Pamplona) and the Guardia Civil two; the Interior Ministry said the system was "en fase de expansión" and gave no figures on arrests. Xataka (15 November 2022) names Thales and its Cogent algorithm and reports about five million faces of detained and suspected people on file. Genbeta (16 February 2023) reports that the Interior Ministry said ABIS would not be used to identify people whose faces are captured by street cameras or for live recognition in public spaces. The sources give no figures on use after May 2024. Guardia Civil use is not recorded here.