France's justice minister wants to match police files to social media

One sentence on the evening news

On Monday, October 19, on TF1's evening news, French justice minister Gérald Darmanin laid out the judicial response to the violence of October 17. He announced 2,513 police custody placements and an instruction sent to every prosecutor's office that same morning: charge the offenses as organized crime, which unlocks 72-hour custody, geolocation and wiretaps.

Then came the sentence this article is about, as Next.ink transcribed it (the French original, in our translation): "And above all, we're going to use facial recognition on the TAJ [...], that is, the police file, there are millions of people in that file, to see whether we have the same images on social media." ICI (formerly France Bleu) reports the same end of the sentence, in connection with images of the violence shared on social media.

It sounds like something new. It's only half new. French police have used facial recognition on this file since 2012. What changes is the end of the sentence, and it can be read in two very different ways.

What the police already do

The TAJ, short for "traitement d'antécédents judiciaires" (criminal records processing), lists people "mis en cause" (named as suspects) in an investigation, as well as victims. According to an Interior Ministry document obtained by Disclose in March 2026, it holds roughly 17 million suspect records, 48 million victims and up to 9 million front-facing portraits. Since 2012, Article R. 40-26 of the code of criminal procedure has allowed a photo of the face, taken for facial recognition, to be stored there.

A May 2022 Senate report describes how it works. An investigator has an image of the person behind an offense and submits it to the file. The software returns at most 200 candidates, with a minimum match rate of 40%. "It is the investigator who ultimately makes the identification," the senators write (from the French-language report, our translation). The machine names no one. It sorts a pile of booking photos and puts the closest look-alikes on top.

And the tool gets plenty of use. In 2021, according to police and gendarmerie answers to senators, it ran 498,871 times for the national police and about 117,000 times for the gendarmerie. Disclose, citing a ministry document, reports nearly one million searches in 2024.

One sentence, two readings

A looting video is circulating on a social network. Investigators pull a looter's face from it and submit it to the TAJ. That's the first reading of the minister's sentence, and it's exactly the use described above: one image, one offense, one search. With thousands of people in custody and hours of phone footage, the scale changes, not the mechanics.

The second reading runs the other way. You start from the millions of faces in the file and go looking for whether they appear in images posted online. That means collecting those images in bulk and feeding every one of them to the machine. It's the difference between showing a suspect's photo at the front desk and sending the clerk out into the street with the whole filing cabinet.

The minister didn't say which of the two he had in mind. His wording, "to see whether we have the same images on social media," can be heard both ways. The ambiguity matters, because a court has already drawn a line at exactly this spot.

What the Conseil d'État wrote in 2022

La Quadrature du Net, a digital rights group, asked for facial recognition in the TAJ to be struck down. On April 26, 2022, the Conseil d'État, France's top administrative court, rejected the request (decision no. 442364). The tool is lawful, it said, but only in cases of absolute necessity, when doubt remains about the identity of a person whose identification is required.

The court also took care to spell out what the text does not allow. In our translation of the French decision, the provisions at issue are not meant to define how images of people in public spaces or posted on social media may be collected, nor to authorize comparing such images systematically or at scale with the biometric templates stored in the file.

Social media is named in the ruling. In 2023, the Senate's law committee drew a conclusion from it: that reservation rules out checking CCTV recordings against the file's entire stock of images. The court approved the lock, not the master key. The second reading of the minister's sentence isn't covered by the text the court examined. It would take another one.

Europe arrives later

The AI Act, the EU's regulation on artificial intelligence, touches this in two places. Its Article 5, in force since February 2025, already bans systems that build or expand a facial recognition database by scraping images from the internet without a target. That's the Clearview AI model: the CNIL had formally ordered the company to stop in 2021 for harvesting nearly 10 billion online images, the Senate noted.

Its Article 26 governs "after-the-fact" identification by police: authorization from a judge or an administrative authority, use limited to a specific offense, and never untargeted. It carves out an exception for the initial identification of a suspect based on facts tied to the offense, which would cover the first reading.

But those obligations won't apply before December 2, 2027. The so-called Omnibus regulation, published in July 2026, pushed back the high-risk rules, police included, by sixteen months. The rule that would settle the hardest case shows up like a speed-limit sign posted after the bend.

A file the CNIL says is poorly kept

That leaves the quality of the reference file. In October 2024, the CNIL, France's data protection authority, reprimanded the Interior and Justice ministries over how they run the TAJ. Acquittals, dismissals and discontinued cases are not carried over as they should be: people cleared by a court stay in the file as "mis en cause." The CNIL ordered them to comply by October 31, 2026.

So software that offers 200 candidates at a 40% match draws on a directory where some of the people who never belonged have never been removed. Use is also spilling over already: Disclose documented in March police officers querying the TAJ by photo during routine ID checks. According to Disclose, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez himself told the Senate on April 1 that "this technique is not legal" in that setting. The CNIL has opened inspections.

What the minister didn't say

He didn't say which way the search would run. He didn't say who would collect the online images, or how many, or whether each search would be tied to a case under a magistrate's oversight. He said nothing about errors, when the software offers 200 faces and an overworked investigator has to pick one.

The Justice Ministry, which carries the announcement, is one of the two the CNIL ordered to clean up this file. The deadline is October 31.