Biometric Surveillance:
How Social Media Turns Your Photos into a Faceprint that Follows You Forever
A single photo you post online can become part of a much larger surveillance network that follows you the rest of your life.
Meta, TikTok, SnapChat and other platforms all have tools to extract biometric data from your photos and videos. This data becomes a digital fingerprint of your physical features, and once it’s collected, can be used to identify and track you across both digital AND physical spaces without your knowledge or consent.
That faceprint is stored, shared and sometimes sold. Government agencies may obtain access either through warrants or private sector deals that bypass the 4th Amendment.
The same technology used to find the criminal can be used to track the protestor, the ‘deviant’ (however that’s currently defined), and you.
How social media collects your biometric data
You post a photo or video online to a platform like Meta, TikTok, or even Snapchat. The platform extracts biometric data from it, which can include your iris pattern, unique distance between your eyes, nose, cheekbones, jawline, along with behavioral traits like how you blink, tilt your head and smile.
These details are turned into a unique mathematical model to represent you called a “faceprint.” Think of it as a barcode for your face.
The more photos and videos, the more angles of your face, the more comprehensive and exact the faceprint.
How Facial Recognition Tracks You in Real Time
Photos and videos can provide the biometric data needed to track people across CCTV and security cameras locally, nationally and internationally.
Many camera systems (especially in urban areas, airports, and stores) are connected to facial recognition software that capture video footage in real-time that automatically scan faces in the crowd in order to match those faces to existing faceprints. If your biometric data is in one of these databases, the system can instantly identify and locate you.
Why Biometric Data is Dangerous to Your Privacy
The Surveillance Web Grows.
This is no longer science fiction. Consider:
- China tracks entire cities of people in this way, monitoring when they cross streets, enter buildings or attend events.
- The UK is one of the most heavily surveilled democracies in the world, using an extensive network of CCTV and facial recognition systems to monitor public spaces with minimal public consent or oversight.
- In the US, this kind of surveillance enables real-time location tracking in public along with historical movement analysis of who you met with, when and where.
You don’t even need to be carrying your phone or logged into any app for this to happen. It’s based on your face, which you can neither turn off nor leave at home.
If that’s not enough reason to protect biometric data, here’s more.
Why we should protect our biometric data
Biometric data is permanent, easily abused and fuels surveillance systems. More specifically:
- Biometric data is permanent and irreplaceable. You can’t change your face or your voice if they are compromised, and once your faceprint or voiceprint is captured by AI systems or stored in a dataset, it’s exposed indefinitely.
- Facial and vocal recognition systems are rapidly evolving. Government agencies, corporations and platforms like Meta, Google and Amazon use facial and voice recognition for identification, surveillance, and profiling. Even subtle facial details or vocal samples can be matched across platforms using AI.
- Your face and voice can be used to train AI without your consent. Companies and bad actors alike can scrape public and unprotected data to train facial recognition and voice synthesis models. Once incorporated into a dataset, there is no way to retrieve it.
- New tools can clone identities from minimal data. Voiceprint technology can be used to spoof or clone someone’s identity using AI voice synthesis (deepfake voice).
- Big Brother is real. Government surveillance programs have begun incorporating passive voiceprint tracking from podcasts, phone calls, and online media.
5 Steps to Protect Your Biometric Data Online
There really is no completely safe way to be on social media, so ideally you’d delete your account and request deletion of your data. That said, for many of us (including myself), there's a value to social media that keeps us from leaving it. If you stay on, then, to protect yourself as much as possible, take these five actions:
- Avoid front-facing, high—res selfies
- Skip Instagram/TikTok filters that require facial scans, put on funny masks or determine ‘what kind of Disney Princess are you’
- Don’t post photos (especially school ones!) with full-face visibility and geotags
- Don’t tag people by face
- Use avatars or Bitmoji for profile pics instead of photos
Fewer photos means less facial data means lower risk of long-term tracking. Every pixel you withhold is power reclaimed.
Want to Get Off the Grid? It’s NOT Too Late
You’re not powerless. Every step you take reduces your digital footprint:
- Cover up smart: Hats, masks, and anti-surveillance clothing make facial recognition less reliable.
- Delete and purge: Shut down social media accounts and request deletion of your data (especially in states like California or Minnesota where laws back you up).
- Push for change: Demand legislation that protects biometric data under your 4th Amendment rights.
Every move we make chips away at the surveillance web. Together, we can do this.
🐇🌾 Down the Rabbit Hole:
TikTok (U.S. Privacy Policy)
TikTok's updated U.S. privacy policy includes a section labelled “Image and Audio Information” where it states:
“We may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under U.S. laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints, from your User Content.”
Snapchat (Snap Inc.)
Snapchat outlines how it uses biometric-like data in its support documentation, especially in the “How Snap Uses Information from the Camera” article:
“Some of our features use info about your face, hands, and voice to make them work, which may be considered biometric identifiers or information under the laws of certain countries or states, such as Illinois, Texas, or Colorado.”
Meta (Facebook/Instagram)
Meta’s official U.S. Regional Privacy Notice covers how user data is collected, although its clearest use of data comes from it legal settlements, especially Attorney General Ken Paxton Secures $1.4 Billion Settlement with Meta Over Its Unauthorized Capture of Personal Biometric Data
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Disclaimer: The above is solely intended for informational purposes and in no way constitutes legal advice or specific recommendations.