Privacy in the Age of Database Surveillance: Toward a Query-Based Model

Rudraksh Lakra and Medha Kolanu argue that contemporary surveillance is no longer centred on the interception of individual communications but on the ability of the state to search and analyse vast interconnected databases. The paper contends that existing privacy scholarship inadequately addresses how constitutional law should regulate database searches and proposes a query-based framework that evaluates surveillance by examining three factors: the scope and design of the query, the nature and scale of the dataset being searched, and the inferences generated from the results. Extending Orin Kerr’s filter-focused model, the authors argue that constitutional scrutiny should apply not only to search outputs but also to the queries themselves, including AI-driven probabilistic searches. They further contend that this framework aligns closely with Indian privacy jurisprudence under Puttaswamy and the proportionality doctrine, and demonstrate its application to both targeted and mass surveillance systems in India, ultimately recommending legal, technical, and institutional safeguards for database surveillance.

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