In the Age of Facial Recognition, Where Do Our Rights Belong?

Abstract

Facial recognition has moved from the laboratory and the checkpoint into ordinary urban life, and the question it raises is no longer technical but political: who may hold the human face, and on what terms? This paper compares how the European Union, the United States, China, India, and a range of developing economies govern facial recognition, and asks why jurisdictions that increasingly share a common regulatory vocabulary-risk-based classification, contextual differentiation, necessity and proportionality, transparency and accountability-still diverge so sharply over the rights they treat as foundational. It argues that these divergences express deeper choices about whether privacy is an inherent right or one interest among many, and about whether rules should be unified and strict or fragmented and flexible. The paper then traces the costs of that divergence: digital borders that obstruct cross-border trade, the concentration of technological power, differing rules on cross-border data flows, and contested standards of fairness. It concludes that global governance should protect a shared moral boundary, namely no large-scale and indiscriminate surveillance and no permanent digital record of ordinary life, while leaving room for institutional diversity.