As facial recognition technology (FRT) becomes more widespread, and its productive processes, supply chains, and circulations more visible and better understood, privacy concepts become more difficult to consistently apply. This chapter argues that privacy and data protection law’s clunkiness in regulating facial recognition is a product of how privacy and data protection conceptualise the nature of online images. Whereas privacy and data protection embed a ‘representational’ understanding of images, the dynamic facial recognition ecosystem of image scraping, dataset production, and searchable image databases used to build FRT suggest that online images are better understood as ‘operational’. Online images do not simply present their referent for easy human consumption, but rather enable and participate in a sequence of automated operations and machine–machine communications that are foundational for the proliferation of biometric techniques. This chapter demonstrates how privacy law’s failure to accommodate this theorisation of images leads to confusion and diversity in the juridical treatment of facial recognition and the declining coherence of legal concepts.

Responding to an environment of panic surrounding social media’s effect on democracy, regulators and other political actors are rushing to fill the policy void with proposals based on anecdote and folk wisdom emerging from whatever is the most recent scandal. The need for real-time production of rigorous, policy-relevant scientific research on the effects of new technology on political communication has never been more urgent. This book represents a clarion call for making social media data available for research, with results concomitantly released in the public domain, even while recognizing the importance of privacy and the business interests of the firms. We hope this concluding chapter, as well as the entire volume, can be helpful in providing a path to do so.