In situations ranging from border control to policing and welfare, governments are using automated facial recognition technology (FRT) to collect taxes, prevent crime, police cities, and control immigration. FRT involves the processing of a person’s facial image, usually for identification, categorisation, or counting. This ambitious handbook brings together a diverse group of legal, computer, communications, and social and political science scholars to shed light on how FRT has been developed, used by public authorities, and regulated in different jurisdictions across five continents. Informed by their experiences working on FRT across the globe, chapter authors analyse the increasing deployment of FRT in public and private life. The collection argues for the passage of new laws, rules, frameworks, and approaches to prevent harms of FRT in the modern state and advances the debate on scrutiny of power and accountability of public authorities which use FRT. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Protest movements are gaining momentum across the world, with Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and strong pro-democracy protests in Chile and Hong Kong taking centre stage. At the same time, many governments are increasing their surveillance capacities in the name of protecting the public and addressing emergencies. Irrespective of whether these events and/or political strategies relate to the war on terror, pro-democracy or anti-racism protests, state resort to technology and increased surveillance as a tool to control the masses and population has been similar. This chapter focusses on the chilling effect of facial recognition technology (FRT) use in public spaces on the right to peaceful assembly and political protest. Pointing to the absence of oversight and accountability mechanisms on government use of FRT, the chapter demonstrates that FRT has significantly strengthened state power. Attention is drawn to the crucial role of tech companies in assisting governments in public space surveillance and curtailing protests, and it is argued that hard human rights obligations should bind these companies and governments, to ensure that political movements and protests can flourish in the post-COVID-19 world.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) tools promise money and unmatched power to banks and governments alike. As the saying goes, they will know everything about their citizens and customers and will also be able to predict their behaviour, preferences, and opinions. Global consulting firm McKinsey estimates that AI technologies will unlock $1 trillion in additional value for the global banking industry every year.1 Governments around the world are getting on the AI bandwagon, expecting increased efficiency, reduced costs, and better insights into their populations.

This chapter offers a synthesis on the role the law has to play in Automated States. Arguing for a new research and regulatory agenda on AI and ADM beyond the artificial ‘public’ and ‘private’ divide, it seeks to identify new approach and safeguards necessary to make AI companies and the Automated States accountable to their customers, citizens and communities. I argue that emphasis on procedural safeguards alone – or what I call procedural fetishism – is not enough to counter the unprecedented levels of AI power in the Automated States. Only by shifting our perspective from procedural to substantive, we can search for new ways to regulate the future in the Automated States. The chapter concludes the collection with an elaboration of what more substantive regulation should look like: create a global instrument on data privacy, redistribute wealth and power by breaking and taxing AI companies, increasing public scrutiny and adopting prohibitive laws; democratizing AI companies by making them public utilities, and giving people a say how these companies should be governed. Crucially, we must also decolonize future AI regulation by recognizing colonial practices of extraction and exploitation and paying attention to the voices of Indigenous peoples and communities of the so-called Global South. With all these mutually reinforcing efforts, the new AI regulation will debunk the corporate and state agenda of procedural fetishism and establish a new social contract in the age of AI.