Facial Recognition Technologies: Threats or Opportunities for Democracy?

The rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights are strictly entrenched in liberal constitutions. The widespread adoption of AI-based technologies can be seen as an opportunity or a serious threat to these pillars. In particular, facial recognition technologies (FRTs) open up a wide range of practical bene ts, but they can also enable new forms of mass surveillance and interference with free and fair elections or citizens’ participation in political life. This chapter examines the implications for democracy of the proliferation of FRTs. To this end, the analysis will focus on three paradigmatic deployments of FRTs, which are: identi cation, that allows people to be tracked in public spaces and thus discourages political participation; categorisation, that allows people to be pro led and thus manipulates political participation; and veri cation, that allows people to be granted access to voting and thus facilitates political participation. For each of these paradigmatic cases, the chapter underlines pros and cons of the use of FRTs, also in order to assess how the legal regulation addresses the concerns raised in the EU context. A fil rouge of the legal response is identi ed in the need to address threats to democracy by ‘democratising’ the same FRTs.