Ambient Personal Data And The Right To Bystander Privacy: AI, Smart Glasses, Social Media, And The Legal Architecture Of Unchosen Surveillance
- IJLLR Journal
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
Lotus Khanna, Christ University
Shashank Soni, Christ University
ABSTRACT
This manuscript argues that the forthcoming evolution of privacy law pertains not to the interaction between a data subject and the entity to whom she voluntarily reveals information, but rather to the pervasive phenomenon of individuals being transformed into data by external devices, platforms, or models. Smart eyewear, mobile cameras, house doorbells, auto sensors, workplace analytics, social media integration, and AI training frameworks have rendered personal data ubiquitous: passively created, relationally interconnected, machine-readable, and perpetually reused. Current privacy regimes provide limited instruments for addressing this issue, such as data minimization, restrictions on special categories, biometric regulations, wiretap legislation, and constitutional principles acknowledging the mosaic- like intrusiveness of aggregated data. However, these instruments are inadequately developed for bystanders, who do not fit the roles of traditional consumers or suspects, users or workers, contractual parties or typical litigants. The book introduces an innovative idea of the right to bystander privacy: a right to acceptable non-participation in data collection, identification, inference, and dissemination. It then advocates for an Ambient Capture Duty, underpinned by Bystander Impact Assessments, device- specific capture minimization, anti-identification defaults, context-sensitive no-capture zones, auditable provenance, and collective remedies. The primary assertion is that privacy law ought to see bystander exposure as a data externality generated by socio-technical systems, rather than as a deficiency in person permission.
Keywords: ambient personal data | bystander privacy | AI | smart glasses | biometric surveillance | consent | social media | GDPR | EU AI Act | DPDP Act | CCPA | data protection reform.
