WG7 Legal, ethics and socio-technical aspects
A sharp debate is emerging over whether biometric technology constitutes a threat to privacy and a potential weapon in the hands of authoritarian governments. Main issues at stakes concern large scale applications, biometric databases, remote and covert biometrics, respect for fair information principles, medical applications, enrolement of vulnerable and disabled groups, information sharing and system interoperability, technological convergence, behavioural biometrics, and surveillance. The EC has funded – in FP6 and FP7 - several projects dealing with these issues, such as:
- BITE (Biometric Identification Technology Ethics)
- HIDE (Homeland security, biometric identification & personal detection ethics)
- FIDIS (Future of Identity in the Information Society)
- Art.29 Working Party
BEST NETWORK builds on these projects in order to incorporate ethical reflection and conversation directly into the industrial and policy matrix. This work package addresses the main ethical, legal, social and cultural aspects of biometrics vis-à-vis the Charter of fundamental rights of the European Union. There will interlinking with LIBE at certain stages during the project.
Issues involved are:
- Privacy: The relevant issues range from the protection of biometric data against ID theft (in the sense of data protection) to the potential exposure of health conditions through additional information that could be extracted from the raw data acquired by a biometric sensor.
- Digital divide and risk of stigmatisation: Certain biometric identifier might not be suitable for certain parts of the population due to physical inabilities or ethnic background.
- Big Brother: The strong authentication ability of biometric would potentially allow tracing a person through stations at which he has to authenticate himself (both physical or virtual) and establishing behavioural profiles
- Function creep: “Function creep” is the term used to describe the expansion of a process or system, where data collected for one specific purpose is subsequently used for another unintended or unauthorized purpose. From a political perspective function creep is a serious breach of public trust and threatens to destroy confidence in biometric systems.
- Medical information and informatization of the body: according to a popular aphorism, biometrics is turning the human body into a passport or a password. More properly, scholars speak of “informatization of the body” to point out the digitalization of physical and behavioural attributes of a person and their distribution across the global information network.
Topics include:
- application specific guidelines and recommendations
- National and European legislation (e.g. implementation of EU guidelines and directives into national legislation)
- best practices and recent studies
- international aspects of data exchange
- outliers and exception handling (including, the aged, the disabled and others