AI Surveillance and the Right to Privacy: Balancing Public Safety and Civil Liberties in India

The fast development of surveillance technologies that are based on artificial intelligence (AI) has made a huge change in policing and governance in India. Facial recognition, predictive policing systems, and big data analytics systems are the systems that are promised to lead to better safety of the population, efficiency of the administration, and crime prevention. Nevertheless, their implementation also brings up some severe constitutional and ethical issues of privacy, autonomy, and democratic liberties. In this paper, the author will explore the implication of AI-based surveillance on the Indian constitution especially on the fundamental right of privacy in Article 21. It examines the ways in which AI surveillance facilitates constant and mass surveillance by pooling CCTV network, biometric databases, social media and mobile devices data together. These practices pose threats to spatial privacy, informational privacy and decisional autonomy as well as having a chilling effect to freedom of speech, association and dissent. The paper also assesses the legality of the AI surveillance in terms of the proportionality test, noting that there is no elaborate law against these technologies in India. It also examines issues to do with the bias and discrimination of algorithms that are likely to have an unequal effect on discriminated groups, which brings about the question of equality in Article 14. Though the given paper does not deny that the issues of national security, crime control, and the overall public safety are the acceptable state objectives, it posits that blanket AI monitoring is not the least restrictive and the most proportionate tool to the purpose. Towards the end of the article, the author emphasizes the necessity of an all-inclusive surveillance legislation that entails judicial checks and balances, transparency, accountability, and anti-abuse provisions so that the effect of technological progress will not be a dent to the constitutional freedoms.