Facial Recognition Technology And The Right To Privacy In India: A Constitutional And Regulatory Analysis

Abstract

Ripe at the confluence of Indian State jurisprudential discourse lies the at once closed-presence and beleaguered occupant of the right to the individual, Privacy, now sewn to the relentless advance of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). Whether deployed by sovereign police, a municipal surveillance net, the doctrinal stitch seems to unravel further as rolls, performs, and repositions the individual profile of every domestic dweller. The surveillance apparatus burgeons beyond the premises of ‘binomial consent’ or ‘security necessity’ as magnitudes of biometric detail relax into both vendor engine and State archive, fastening the broader tableau of data-handling, earlier drawn only from handwriting and testimony, to a permanence once accorded sacred relic. The pursuit offered here entwines what the law adroitly terms ‘intrinsic spin-offs’ of the jurisprudential oeuvre since 1950, obliges the text to process every dash of precedential script upon the disguised visage, and re-examines article sovereign lies re-constructed in such casually minted permanence of facial tiles. This paper home in on the constitutional foundations of privacy as elaborated in the landmark judgment of Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) V. Union of India (2017), where the Supreme Court squarely held that the primarily on constitutional right to privacy: the Aadhaar validity case was decided separately in 2018.The ruling requires that any encroachment on privacy must be justified by a law that is just, fair and reasonable, underlining the necessity of strict safeguards when deploying intrusive technologies such as facial recognition. The absence of binding and coherent legislation has created a regulatory vacuum, further complicated by the fragmented schema of the Information Technology Act, the narrow provisions of the Aadhaar Act, and various advisory frameworks that government bodies have offered on a non-mandatory basis.