Privacy, Surveillance, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Nigeria: A Human Rights Constitutional Framework

This doctoral research constructs an original human rights constitutional framework for privacy protection in the context of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies in Nigeria, addressing a critical gap in Nigerian constitutional scholarship at the intersection of emerging technology governance and fundamental rights. The proliferation of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, big data analytics, biometric identification, and predictive policing technologies in Nigeria's security and commercial sectors poses unprecedented threats to the right to privacy under Section 37 of the 1999 Constitution and Article 17 of the ICCPR. The existing constitutional and legislative framework for privacy protection in Nigeria predates these technological developments and is structurally inadequate for the governance challenges they present. The research draws on Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism theory, Daniel Solove's contextual integrity framework, the UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy's reports on surveillance technology, and comparative constitutional privacy jurisprudence from Germany, India, and South Africa to construct the theoretical architecture. A doctrinal methodology analyzes the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, the Cybercrime Act, and the constitutional privacy provision to identify normative gaps. An original Constitutional Digital Privacy Framework (CDPF) is developed for Nigeria, incorporating a constitutional right to informational self-determination, mandatory algorithmic accountability for public bodies, prohibition of mass biometric surveillance without judicial authorization, and an independent Digital Rights Authority. The CDPF constitutes a substantial original contribution to Nigerian constitutional scholarship. Keywords: privacy rights, surveillance, Fourth Industrial Revolution, constitutional framework, Nigeria.