title: Analyzing the Privacy, Racial and Gender Concerns in Facial Recognition Technology for Effective Regulation
Creators: name: Duruiheoma, Chidinma Maureen
Publisher: name: Law
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Facial Recognition Technology
subject: Artificial Intelligence
subject: Privacy
subject: Critical Race Theory
subject: Critical Race Feminism
subject: Law
subject: FOS: Law
subject: Artificial Intelligence
subject: Gender Studies
subject: Ethnic and Racial Studies

description: Facial recognition technology (FRT) is a biometric identification and verification system that uses computer algorithms to compare unique facial characteristics from a digital image or video against a digital database of human faces and matching similar or identical faces accordingly. The technology has been touted as a major innovation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) especially with check mating insecurity since 911. However, FRT has been plagued by issues of privacy as well as racial and gender concerns. A study conducted to understand the privacy concerns emanating from the deployment of facial recognition revealed that 70% of participants raised privacy concerns about the technology.1 Among other things, they indicated their fear for constant surveillance, repurposing of their facial images for other uses beyond what they consented to, lack of proper security safeguards, and the high risk of misidentification by security agents as some of their concerns. Beyond the violation of privacy rights, FRT poses civil right challenges to marginalized groups. Civil liberty advocates have highlighted the impact this technology has on Black people. Additionally, studies on the accuracy of FRTs on different demographics have shown that the rate of misidentification is highest for women with darker skin tones, especially Black women than any other group, and this has led to troubling cases of misgendering and misrecognition of black women.2 This thesis intends to analyze these concerns with the intention of making recommendations that will provide a framework for the effective regulation of FRT in both the private and public sectors. A breakdown of this will be done as stated below: Chapter One will provide an overview of FRT, that is definitions, history, and the different forms of FRT. It will also capture the research problems and methodologies that will be utilized to address the concerns of FRT. Chapter Two will focus on the privacy concerns of FRT. It will start with a theoretical analysis of the right to privacy, and will subsequently discuss the privacy issues in the development and use of FRT. Chapter Three will concentrate on the racial concerns of FRT. It will discuss how the developers of FRT perpetuate racial bias by disproportionately representing people of color in the training datasets. It will also discuss some effects of racial bias like wrongful arrest and revocation of immigration status based on the output of privately developed FRT Chapter Four will analyze the gender concerns of FRT. It will also analyze the high error rate of FRTs for black women and how it misgenders them as men or misrecognizes them entirely. Furthermore, it will discuss how this culminates to the essentialization of Eurocentric feature as the yardstick for femininity. Finally, Chapter Five will capture some recommendations that will provide effective strategies in the development and use of FRT.