tango blogpost 

A brief summary of the study on the ”Biometric Surveillance around the World” (Beyond the Face: Biometrics and Society) published by our partner SHARE Foundation.

One of the most comprehensive studies of advanced biometric systems, technology that underpins them and national legal frameworks regulating their use across the world, Beyond the Face: Biometrics and Society (SHARE Foundation, 2023) offers a current snapshot of the global state of biometric surveillance. The book helps readers from various fields of interest 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 deploying these intrusive technologies. The book opens with the chapter on technology that is used for digitization of our bodily features, extracting our images from personal online contexts, and production of templates to monitor, categorize, and handle human beings. Another chapter is dedicated to existing legal rules in a dozen countries, catching pace with the lighting-speed technological development and resisting pressures from powerful stakeholders.

A standout theme throughout the 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. Selected high-profile case studies are extensively covered in the final chapter on practice, from Myanmar and the United Kingdom to New York and Belgrade, within border control, public space monitoring in major cities, or suppression of dissent.

 “Beyond the Face: Biometrics and Society” is written by: Bojan Perkov (Technology), Jelena Adamović and Duje Kozomara (Law), Mila Bajić and Duje Prkut (Practice) and Edited by: Ella Jakubowska (EDRi), Andrej Petrovski & Danilo Krivokapić (SHARE Foundation)