Remember that time you used a puppy-face filter on Snapchat? Or the first moment your iPhone unlocked just by looking at you? Harmless, right? Except, your face wasn’t just a fun visual. It was data. Valuable data. And chances are, that data has already trained more algorithms than you know.
In today’s hyper-digitized world, your face is no longer just your own. It’s your password, your signature, and increasingly your currency. From airport check-ins to virtual try-ons and biometric payments, facial recognition is sold as the next wave of convenience. But behind every “Face ID success” or cute AR filter is a deeper, more opaque question: if your face is feeding AI systems across the globe, does it still belong to you?
The Casual Start: When Fun Met Data
Facial recognition didn’t arrive with a bang. It crept in charmingly. Snapchat’s facial filters were among the first to popularize real-time facial landmark mapping. In 2015, when the company acquired Ukraine-based Looksery for over $150 million, it wasn’t just buying funny masks. It was buying the power to understand, categorise, and augment human faces.
Soon after, Apple released Face ID (2017), turning biometric unlocking into a seamless norm. No more passwords. Just look. Google followed with facial grouping in Photos. Facebook, now Meta, used facial recognition to auto-tag friends. Then came TikTok filters, Zoom virtual makeup, and Instagram’s beauty-enhancing lenses. We invited the algorithm to study our faces for beauty, for laughs, and sometimes, just for boredom.
The problem? None of these platforms were asking for enough informed consent. Most users didn’t know (or read) what they were giving up. And those pixel maps of your face? They were being stored, analyzed, and possibly shared.
Face as Data: The Technical Breakdown
Your face, when captured by modern apps or devices, is not saved as a photo but as a set of data points, unique vectors like the distance between your eyes, nose shape, jawline angle, and skin tone. This is often called a faceprint, much like a fingerprint. It’s used to authenticate identity (like unlocking your phone), but in many cases, it also becomes training data for machine learning systems.
In most commercial uses, the goal is to build models that can:
- Recognise identity (security, payments)
- Infer emotion (marketing, surveillance)
- Predict age, gender, ethnicity (ad targeting, profiling)
- Track behaviour across time or platforms
And here’s where things get tricky: once this data is collected, who owns it?
Big Brands, Bigger Questions
Apple claims its Face ID data never leaves the device and remains encrypted. This makes Apple a relatively safer player in space. But not all companies follow this gold standard.
Snapchat has long been criticized for vague privacy terms. Though it claims not to store biometric identifiers, it collects facial feature data to power its filters. In 2022, it was sued in Illinois under the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) for allegedly violating consent norms.
Meta (Facebook) discontinued its facial recognition program in 2021, deleting over 1 billion faceprints. But critics argue that the company has already used years of facial data to train internal AI models.
TikTok, owned by ByteDance, has been under scrutiny for collecting “biometric identifiers and biometric information,” including “faceprints and voiceprints,” as updated in its 2021 privacy policy. TikTok has not fully clarified how this data is stored or shared.
Meanwhile, AI firms like Clearview AI have openly admitted to scraping billions of images from public platforms (without consent) to build facial recognition tools sold to law enforcement. In 2023, they settled several lawsuits but continued to operate under limited capacities in certain regions.
From Fun to Function: Your Face Is Everywhere
What started as social media gimmicks is now embedded into systems of power:
- Banking apps like Kotak and HDFC in India now offer facial verification for onboarding.
- Airports across India are rolling out DigiYatra, which uses facial recognition to let travellers board without showing documents.
- Retail stores and ad kiosks in malls now experiment with facial analytics to estimate age, emotion, and dwell time.
- Police departments use facial recognition for tracking suspects, often without judicial oversight.
Data Theft & Deepfakes: The Dark Side
Beyond convenience lies the more sinister concern: data misuse.
A leaked database of facial recognition models, such as in the infamous Clearview AI hack, exposed how facial data collected from social media had been sold to governments without consent.
More alarmingly, deepfake technology, where AI morphs someone’s face onto another’s body in a video, has matured rapidly. In India, multiple cases of revenge deepfakes and AI-generated political disinformation have already emerged. Your selfie today could become someone else’s alibi tomorrow.
Legal Loopholes and India’s Position
India does not yet have a dedicated biometric data protection law, though the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, provides some relief. It mandates explicit consent for personal data collection, but enforcement mechanisms remain unclear, especially regarding facial data used by apps for “voluntary features.”
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which handles Aadhaar, insists biometric data is safe and encrypted, but past breaches and a lack of audit transparency raise doubts.
In comparison, countries like the EU (under GDPR) and Illinois, USA (BIPA) have clearer guidelines. They require:
- Explicit opt-in for biometric data collection
- Limited data retention
- Right to access and delete biometric data
India still lags in providing similar guarantees.
So, Does Your Face Still Belong to You?
This question cuts through legal jargon and marketing spin. If your face is scanned, mapped, analysed, and used to train commercial or governmental AI models, does it remain your property?
The answer is legally and ethically mis murky.
As consumers, we trade privacy for convenience. But increasingly, trade isn’t fair. We’re not just users; we’re unpaid data donors. And while we can revoke access to our photos, we can’t revoke what our faces teaches an algorithm once it is trained.
What You Can Do
- Read the Privacy Policy before using apps with face filters.
- Turn off camera permissions for apps that don’t need them.
- Opt-out of face grouping on platforms like Google Photos.
- Ask brands how your facial data is stored and used. If they can’t answer, maybe don’t trust them.
- Push for clearer laws around biometric ownership and consent.
Your face is your identity. Your data. Your story. But in a digital world where every glance becomes a datapoint, we need to ask: Is our face still ours, or have we already given it away?
As brands compete to personalize everything from try-ons to ticketing, it’s not paranoia to ask where the line is. It’s self-preservation.
