Case technology 1 : Biometrics

Security technology and biometrics:

In the aftermath of 9/11 the world has seen an intensification of security measures in various
walks of public life, most notably in commercial aviation. This again has led to an
intensification of research on technologies that effectively can be used to identify individual
identities quickly and reliably.

Biometrics referred originally to the handling of data on biological communities of various kinds. Nowadays it refers mostly to the development of biological methods to uniquely identify humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral trait. Face features, fingerprints, hand impressio

ns, iris recognition or DNA can all be seen as such intrinsic physiological features that can be used in biometrics.

Behavioral traits that could be used are e.g. signatures or voice characteristics. Work on these
technologies is already quite advanced and methods are in the pipeline that soon will appear
in personal identification papers.

The EU stated in their Hague Programme (2004) the following: “The European Council invites the Council, the Commission and the Member States to continue their efforts to integrate biometric identifiers in travel documents, visa, residence permits, EU citizens’ passports and information systems without delay and to prepare for the development of minimum standards for national identity cards…” (EU 2004)

The performance of different biometric technologies can be compared on a number of
different parameters, such as e.g. universality, uniqueness, permanence, collectability,
Value Isobars – Annex 1: Description of work 25 performance, acceptability, and circumvention, and different technologies typically score differently on these parameters  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/biometrics ).

In terms of ethical issues involved, two measures are particularly relevant: the Failure-to-enroll-rate (FTER) which refers to the situation where the initial data are not or improperly collected; the falsenon- match-rate (FNMR), which refers to the situation where data presented for verification
are falsely rejected.

Risk of social exclusion

Jeremy Wickins, a former student of one of the project partners, published a thought
provoking article on the ethics of biometrics in 2007. He identifies as the most salient
ethical challenge in biometrics the risk of social exclusion. The term “social exclusion” refers
here

 to any “unfair restriction or removal of access to the range of social goods and activities
that other members of that society do, or could, take for granted” (for referances see Project description under Documents).

This is clearly an ethical issue that hinges on discussions of fairness and equality. It is then recognized that the argument for the widespread use of identification technologies based on biometrics is essentially utilitarian: the public interest in increased security is balanced against the rights of the individuals.