Unconsented Sensing: A Sociotechnical Governance Framework for 6G ISAC

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a sociotechnical governance framework for 6G ISAC to ensure privacy, transparency, and legal compliance, addressing limitations of current technocentric security approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a regulatory and sociotechnical framework with three pillars—purpose-bound sensing, transparency, and accountability—to align 6G ISAC deployment with digital rights laws.

Findings

Identifies legal friction points with EU AI Act and GDPR.

Proposes governance pillars for lawful ISAC deployment.

Provides a regulatory roadmap to prevent illegal sensing infrastructure deployment.

Abstract

The forthcoming deployment of 6G Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) will transform cellular infrastructure into pervasive, continuous environmental and biometric sensing grids. While current telecom standardization efforts (e.g., 3GPP, ETSI) have formally recognized privacy and trustworthiness as critical pillars for 6G, their proposed mitigations remain overwhelmingly technocentric, relying on cryptographic anonymization and physical layer security. This approach critically underestimates the sociotechnical and legal complexities of the downstream machine learning (ML) models required to interpret raw sensing data, creating a profound collision with existing digital rights legislation. This position paper argues that technical security is insufficient. ISAC trustworthiness must be redefined as mandatory regulatory and sociotechnical compliance. We identify the specific legal friction points between continuous ISAC surveillance and the mandates of emerging global digital rights regimes, using the stringent requirements of the EU AI Act and GDPR as our primary regulatory baselines. To bridge this gap, we propose a governance framework centered on three pillars: Purpose-bound sensing activation, citizen transparency mechanisms, and algorithmic accountability for ISAC-driven ML models. Ultimately, this paper provides a regulatory roadmap to prevent the illegal deployment of 6G sensing infrastructures and ensure they remain viable before physical deployment.