Monika Zalnieriute (Vilnius University) has posted Beyond Procedural Fetishism: The Inadequacy of GDPR in Regulating Facial Recognition Technologies and Public Space Surveillance (in M. Ebers and K. Sein (eds.) Privacy, Data Protection and Data-Driven Technologies, Edgar Elgar, 2024, p. 328-367) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Facial recognition technology (FRT) is assisting governments and business to monitor crowds and employees, identify customers and collect taxes. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides only a generalist approach towards FRT use, which does not adequately account for the significant FRT risks to undermine privacy, due process, political protests and equal protection. This chapter demonstrates how FRT has significantly expanded state and corporate power, arguing that the GDPR is engaging in a procedural fetishism-a tendency to focus on procedural safeguards, grounded in the assumption that these can adequately protect against power expansion and abuse. To counter procedural fetishism in FRT governance, the laws and jurisprudence must engage with substantive questions about how to limit the state and corporate power that FRT expands. The new FRT regulation must redistribute power by fortifying regulatory enforcement, adopting prohibitive laws and breaking, taxing and democratizing tech companies by making them public utilities and giving people a say in how they should be governed. It must also decolonize FRT discourse through recognizing colonial practices of extraction and exploitation. With these efforts, the new FRT regulation will debunk procedural fetishism to ensure that political protests, privacy and due process can flourish in the modern state.
Recommended.