Facial recognition technology for policing and surveillance in the Global South: a call for bans

Abstract

The use of facial recognition technology (FRT) for policing and surveillance is spreading across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Advocates are saying this technology can solve crimes, locate missing people and prevent terrorist attacks. Yet, as this article argues, deploying FRT for policing and surveillance poses a grave threat to civil society, especially systems to identify or track people without any criminal history. In every political system, this has the potential to deepen discriminatory policing, have a chilling effect on activism and turn everyone into a suspect. The dangers rise exponentially, moreover, in places with inconsistent rule of law, poor human rights records, weak privacy and data laws and authoritarian rulers – traits common across scores of countries now installing FRT. Regulating use is unlikely to prevent these harms, the article contends, given the powerful political and corporate forces in play, given the ways firms push legal limits, exploit loopholes and lobby legislators, and given the tendency over time of surveillance technology to creep across state agencies and into new forms of social control. Calls to ban FRT are growing louder by the day. This article makes the case for why bans are especially necessary in the Global South.

Keywords:

• Facial recognition technology
• surveillance
• policing
• human rights
• civil liberties
• developing countries

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for Third World Quarterly and Rebecca Rogers for her superb research assistance with this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2014-0115].

Notes on contributors

Peter Dauvergne

Peter Dauvergne is Professor of International Relations at the University of British Columbia. His recent books include: Identified, Tracked, and Profiled: The Politics of Resisting Facial Recognition Technology (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022); AI in the Wild: Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2020); Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet? (Polity Press, 2018); Environmentalism of the Rich (MIT Press, 2016); Protest Inc.: The Corporatization of Activism (coauthored with Genevieve LeBaron, Polity Press, 2014); and Eco-Business: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability (coauthored with Jane Lister, MIT Press, 2013).