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1. Introduction
The use of face recognition technology is becoming increasingly common all around the world. As algorithms get more reliable every year, more and more law enforcement agencies make use of biometric technologies that mimic human abilities to recognize faces. The benefits of face recognition technology are real, and law enforcement officers are importantly assisted by it in their effort to protect citizens and guarantee social security.
It would be naive, however, to think that the spread of this technology brings with it no unfortunate side-effect. And in fact, civil libertarians have not hesitated to denounce the risks for our privacy implicated by such a diffusion of automated face recognition systems. A hot debate exists today over how face recognition technology impacts privacy and civil liberties and whether such important issues as civil rights, transparency and accountability are threatened by its dissemination and to what degree (Bowyer, 2004; Cammozzo, 2011; Finn et al., 2013; Senior and Pankanti, 2011).
These concerns are of utmost importance, and it is not our intention to portray them as less significant than scholars agree about. Rather, our goal is trying to highlight a different sort of worry that so far has remained invisible as an effect of the general tendency to focus on aforementioned questions. When we deal with biometric technologies – and with face recognition technology in particular – we are only concerned with privacy issues. But framing the debate in the discourse of universal rights obscures the topography of the different degrees of heaviness of the hand of surveillance for different demographics. “Through that lens [the lens of the discourse of universal rights], government surveillance is seen as inflicting its harms on everyone” – Gellman and Adler-Bell (2017) say – but “surveillance is not at all the same thing at higher and lower elevations on the contour map of privilege”.
Our paper aims to show that face recognition technology leans against a society deeply affected by racial disparities produced by past and present racist attitudes and, in consequence, confirms and even reinforces racial discrimination. We will focus on some causal pathways through which this happens; and we will conclude that – unless adequate countermeasures are adopted – high is the risk that face recognition technology further...