Title: Conceptualizing Facial Recognition Technology in its technical and legal dimensions

Abstracts: This research makes an introductory overview on Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). It explains its functions and some applications and the public perception of the technology by different stakeholders such as citizens, regulators, privacy advocates, and Big tech companies. Then, the research focuses on a throughout analysis of facial images as personal, sensitive, and biometric data to evaluate whether FRT falls within the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). After that, there is an overview of the main challenges that FRT entails from a legal perspective. As the vast majority of FRT systems deployed nowadays are empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), FRT inherits some of the main ethical and legal concerns associated to AI such as the ones analysed by the literature stream on FAT (Fairness, Accountability and Transparency). This research will analyse these issues with a special focus on the accountability problems and will try to conclude whether the current privacy regulation at European level (GDPR) will suffice to answer them, whether it will need to be adapted to this new challenge or to embrace a complete banning.

Bio: Natalia Menéndez González is a First-year PhD researcher at the Law Department at the European University Institute (Florence) and former researcher at the Constitutional Law Department at the University of Oviedo (Spain). Her PhD thesis focuses on privacy-driven algorithmic accountability for FRT empowered by AI. She is concurrently working on the controversial use of FRT by Facebook and also the privacy impact of FRT usage during the COVID-19 health emergency. She has a trajectory at diverse Law firms in Spain and is a founding member of COYDER (an association devoted to promote the public communication of the Law) and member of the Lucena Bar Association.