Digital Authoritarianism 2.0: Surveillance & Central Asians’ Right to Privacy

• In Event: Digital Authoritarianism in the Communist and Post-Communist World

Abstract

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing an unprecedented proliferation of high-resolution artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance cameras, drones, and facial recognition software to tackle the spread of infectious diseases. Already prior to the current pandemic, Central Asian governments were known for using closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras to assist in policing urban centres (Marat and Sutton 2020). These cameras have been adapted to tackle the spread of the virus and enforce quarantine measures. For example, in October 2020 police in Uzbekistan's far eastern Fergana region began to use CCTV cameras with facial recognition software to detect whether citizens are wearing face masks in public spaces. While surveillance cameras are useful for efforts to combat the virus, recent studies have paid little attention to the wider Central Asian public’s attitude toward their presence. This article is designed to fill the gap with regard to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It employs the World Value Survey Wave 7 (Haerpfer et al. 2020) country data sets to run several regression analyses in R to test whether Central Asian people’s privacy concerns – the independent variable – affect their approval of CCTV cameras in public spaces – the dependent variable.

Author

• Jasmin Dall'Agnola, OSCE Academy