Facial Recognition Surveillance

Abstract Scanning millions of faces each year, facial recognition technology (FRT) has become one of today’s fastest-growing and most controversial AI-driven surveillance technologies. Based on rare ethnographic access to police FRT deployments, this book examines the role and impact of this technology on operational practices, surveillance capabilities, and human rights protections. Drawing on the sociology of policing, science and technology studies, and human rights scholarship, the book demonstrates how this surveillance technology both shapes and is shaped by the complex operational environments into which it is deployed, in the process dramatically reshaping police–citizen street encounters.

This unique analysis offers several empirically informed contributions that position FRT as a socio-technical system capable of changing the fundamental nature of policing. The affordances of FRT invite specific forms of surveillance expansion that override the intelligence case justifying an operation. Analysis of human–FRT interaction reveals a complex digital nuancing of suspicion, ultimately undermining the role of ‘human-in-the-loop’ safeguards and challenging the foundational legal principles governing state surveillance practices.

The book also reveals the highly selective scientific and legal discourses used to legitimize AI-driven surveillance expansion. Here, oft-repeated claims of efficacy, racial impartiality, and public safety are found wanting when subjected to detailed scrutiny. The book draws additionally on the latest human rights theory and practice to specify a due diligence framework specifically tailored to the police FRT uses and, separately, advances the concept of ‘compound human rights harm’ to meaningfully capture the true impact of surveillance, and its multifaceted, complex, and dynamic effects.