SA is sleepwalking into a surveillance state

WALK into a shopping mall in Durban, Cape Town, or Johannesburg today, and your face has probably already been scanned, logged, and analysed ~ all without your knowledge or consent.

- SOZARN BARDAY

Facial recognition technology is spreading rapidly across South Africa, slipping into public spaces under the banner of “safety” and “convenience” In truth, it is eroding one of our most basic rights: the right to be anonymous in public.

The spread goes far beyond shopping centres. Gated estates now demand facial scans at their entrances, quietly storing the biometric details of domestic workers and visitors with zero transparency and no consent. Security companies assure us this is “for our protection,” but they never answer the hard questions: Who owns the data? How long is it kept? Who can access it - and for what purpose?

Even in our personal lives, we contribute to this growing system. Phones that unlock with our faces or fingerprints generate digital identity trails we rarely consider. These trails can be - and often are - accessed by corporations, law enforcement, or hackers. A tool marketed as convenience can quickly become an instrument of surveillance.

To grasp the full scale, it helps to understand how the technology works.