Biometrics and the State: Can They Be Trusted?

• In Event: The Biometric Body as Public Good? Questions of Legitimacy & Valuation in Human Identification

Abstract

Many States already utilise biometric technologies in attempts to ensure domestic ‘security’, with most also planning the expansion and intensification of biometric regimes. The UK Government in 2018 released a ‘Biometric Strategy’, intended to outline a ‘framework for governance and oversight’ that would be ‘flexible and fit for the future’. The Strategy instantly met with criticism for the paucity of detail, underlying principles, and lack of ‘strategy’, giving justifiable rise to concerns about the content, and intent behind the Home Office Biometrics Programme already underway. While vague public statements about an ‘ethical approach’ and ‘proportionality’ proliferate, evidence of how, when, and by whom, such values are calibrated, remain unarticulated. This paper will examine what values are actually guiding the Home Office Biometrics Programme, and how these are influencing policy. It will interrogate what values ought to be guiding decisionmaking in order to ensure that the State use of biometrics has the confidence and trust of the public. How these values are gauged, and weighted will be considered, ultimately concluding that most often, the evidence required to enable calculations to be made about ‘proportionality’ and ‘impact’ is missing, indeed impossible to determine. Additionally, the values invoked are often transitory, contentious, and culturally specific, so cannot simultaneously also be prescriptive and universally accepted.
Insight into the values accounted for in policymaking around biometric technology will deepen the understanding of how States approach questions of scientific and technological advancement in democracies.

Author

• Carole I McCartney, Northumbria University