Contemporary Issues in Law, Culture, and Globalization 3092-7250 2 Serial Number 9 2026 05 01 Globalization, Cultural Identity, and the Right to Privacy: Regulating Cross-Border Biometric Surveillance Globalization, Cultural Identity, and the Right to Privacy: Regulating Cross-Border Biometric Surveillance 1 13 EN Journal Article <p>The global expansion of biometric surveillance technologies has created new tensions between security, privacy, cultural identity, and individual autonomy. Facial recognition, gait analysis, voice identification, fingerprint databases, emotion recognition, and other biometric systems are increasingly deployed by governments and private actors in airports, public spaces, workplaces, educational institutions, border zones, and commercial environments. Although legal debates generally focus on data protection and informational privacy, biometric surveillance also raises important cultural questions because bodily appearance, clothing, religious practices, facial coverings, behavioral conventions, and social understandings of public exposure vary considerably across communities. This article examines the regulation of biometric surveillance through an integrated framework of privacy law, cultural rights, and globalization. Using comparative legal analysis, it investigates how different jurisdictions regulate biometric technologies and how transnational technology providers export surveillance infrastructures across societies with different constitutional and cultural traditions. The study argues that the globalization of biometric systems risks normalizing surveillance standards developed within particular political and cultural environments while obscuring their unequal consequences for minorities, migrants, religious communities, and culturally distinctive groups. Existing notice-and-consent approaches are especially inadequate in public environments where individuals cannot meaningfully avoid biometric capture. The article proposes a rights-based governance framework centered on necessity, proportionality, purpose limitation, algorithmic accuracy, independent authorization, anti-discrimination safeguards, and culturally sensitive biometric impact assessments. It further distinguishes between identification, verification, categorization, and inferential biometric technologies, arguing that each should be subject to different levels of legal scrutiny. By connecting biometric privacy with cultural autonomy, the study expands conventional privacy scholarship beyond individual data control toward the collective implications of surveillance infrastructures. It concludes that cross-border biometric governance requires internationally compatible minimum safeguards while preserving the capacity of societies to impose stronger restrictions according to their constitutional traditions and culturally grounded expectations of privacy.<br><br></p>