Regulating the use of facial recognition and face analysis in public spaces is undoubtedly one of the most pressing issues today when it comes to the regulation of artificial intelligence in democratic societies. There is an important debate going on worldwide about the “red lines” that should be established by regulators in order to prevent people’s freedoms being endangered as the result of the use of facial recognition technologies (FRT). In Europe especially, where privacy, data protection and human rights lie at the very heart of the European integration project, this debate is more necessary and pressing than ever. The importance of this issue is reflected in the ongoing legislative work that has followed the European Commission’s introduction, in April 2021, of the draft AI regulation, which includes several important proposals to regulate the use of facial recognition. Curiously, though, the debate about these fundamental questions is taking place in the absence of a profound assessment of how existing European law is being applied to these issues. Furthermore, the debate on these issues in Europe is also characterised by a high level of imprecision. Journalists, activists and politicians sometimes have a tendency to treat “facial recognition” as a single monolithic bloc, lumping the different functionalities and uses of facial recognition together. In contrast, in an important Opinion published in 2019 the French DPA, CNIL, stressed the importance of clarity and precision to fostering the conditions necessary for an informed and useful debate. “Behind the catch-all term, there are multiple use cases” said the CNIL, adding that “in this context, a use-by-use approach must be applied”. This is precisely the main objective of the “MAPping the use of Facial Recognition in public spaces in Europe” (MAPFRE) project. Our intention is to offer a detailed independent study that separately presents and analyses the different categories of FRT use in publicly accessible places in the European Union and the UK.