Beyond the Face: Biometrics and Society

INTRODUCTION
In January 2019, the Serbian Minister of Internal Affairs made a 
groundbreaking announcement on national television, revealing their 
collaboration with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant. This partnership was 
poised to transform Belgrade into the first capital in Europe covered by 
thousands of cameras equipped with facial recognition capabilities. This 
announcement set off alarm bells for us, and we recognised the urgent need 
for immediate action, lest the streets of Belgrade undergo an irreversible 
transformation.
After nearly five years of relentless opposition to the introduction of face 
recognition surveillance in our city, involving three Ministers of Internal 
Affairs in Serbia, two withdrawn Draft Laws, numerous meetings, and 
countless hours devoted to research, campaigning, and advocacy, we 
made the decision to pen a book. Despite our familiarity with navigating 
uncharted waters, the realisation that the government was boasting about 
surveilling the entire population using AI technology presented us with a 
formidable challenge. Fortunately, we received support from individuals 
within our city and from partners facing similar threats worldwide, without 
whom our work would have been impossible.
This book is one of the most comprehensive explorations of how biometric 
systems are being used around the world and the laws (or lack of) which 
prescribe this. Whilst it does not profess to be exhaustive, it gives a snapshot 
of the global state of biometric surveillance in 2023. It is aimed at anyone 
wanting to better understand what biometric mass surveillance is, why we 
should care, and what can give us hope in the face of powerful state and 
private actors.
A standout theme throughout this book is the serious harm that these 
systems can lead to and the extreme violence which they facilitate. Traumatic 
wrongful arrests, eugenics, ethnic cleansing, exclusion, pushbacks and 
persecution are at the heart of biometric mass surveillance practices. 
These practices in turn are driven by a global biometric surveillance industry 
where profits are privileged over people and our rights, and by states who 
believe – despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary – that these 
systems contribute to a secure society. Each of the three sections of this 
book recognises that biometric technologies, and how they are used, are 
intrinsically a political issue.
Another key finding is just how difficult it is to uncover information 
about what’s truly going on. From technical specifications, through to 
procurement processes and actual deployments: biometric systems have 
been shrouded in secrecy, further tipping the power balance between those 
who watch on the one hand, and those that get watched on the other. 
There are likely to be many more abuses hidden in plain sight. The authors 
of this book have been reliant on, and are deeply grateful for, the work of 
journalists, lawyers, researchers and civil society groups who have fought 
tirelessly to expose the truth. On the regulatory front, dozens of data 
protection authorities, as well as independent supervisors like the Scottish 
Biometrics Commissioner and the NYPD Comptroller, are doing vital 
work to bring information to the public. However, these groups are all 
chronically under-resourced.
The legal situation across the world is changing rapidly, even in the final 
stages of writing this book. Delicately-brokered attempts to outlaw public 
facial recognition in some US states and in the EU have come under fire 
from politicians claiming that they will help fight serious crime. Moratoria 
are enacted then withdrawn, and efforts to regulate fizzle out. This is despite 
the fact that in the course of researching this book, we did not find even a 
single example of biometric mass surveillance technologies keeping people 
safe or contributing to justice – but a landslide of evidence of the harms.