The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Right to Privacy: A Human Rights Perspective

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly transformed systems of governance, commerce, and social organisation, fundamentally altering how personal data is collected, processed, and utilised. While AI technologies promise efficiency, innovation, and enhanced decision-making, they simultaneously pose profound challenges to the protection of the right to privacy—a core human right grounded in dignity, autonomy, and democratic participation. This thesis critically examines the extent to which contemporary AI systems threaten the right to privacy under international human rights law and evaluates whether existing legal frameworks are adequate to respond to these challenges. The study adopts a doctrinal and comparative legal methodology, drawing on international and regional human rights instruments, judicial decisions, soft law standards, and scholarly literature. It analyses key legal regimes, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, the General Data Protection Regulation, and emerging AI-specific regulatory initiatives such as the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. The thesis further incorporates comparative perspectives from Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, and selected Global South jurisdictions to illustrate uneven regulatory capacity and enforcement. The central argument advanced is that traditional privacy frameworks—largely premised on individual consent, secrecy, and data control—are increasingly inadequate in the face of AI-driven practices such as mass surveillance, biometric identification, predictive analytics, automated decision-making, and inference-based profiling. These technologies generate structural, collective, and anticipatory harms that transcend individualised notions of privacy and undermine existing enforcement mechanisms. The research demonstrates that AI intensifies power asymmetries between individuals, states, and corporations, eroding informational autonomy and enabling forms of surveillance and social control incompatible with human rights norms. To address these deficiencies, the thesis proposes a reconceptualisation of privacy as a positive, structural, and collective human right. It argues for a human rights–based framework for AI governance that prioritises dignity, accountability, transparency, and non-discrimination over purely market-driven or ethics-based approaches. Key recommendations include mandatory human rights impact assessments for high-risk AI systems, strengthened regulatory oversight and enforcement powers, enhanced algorithmic transparency and explainability, recognition of group privacy harms, and greater international regulatory harmonisation. The thesis contributes to legal scholarship by integrating AI governance into the core of international human rights law and offering a principled framework for safeguarding privacy in the digital age. It concludes that without proactive, rights-based regulation, AI risks entrenching systemic privacy violations and undermining the normative foundations of human rights and democratic society. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Right to Privacy; International Human Rights Law; Data protection; Surveillance; Algorithmic Governance; Group Privacy