The Privacy Issues

Any time we consider giving up personal information to someone else, we

have to consider what the implications are. For example, we might be perfectly

comfortable with telling family members where the secret stash of

emergency money in our home is, but not as willing to share that information

with a co-worker. These days there is so much information about each of us

that seems to just somehow make its way to the Internet, government offices,

and employment databases that savvy information users are being very careful

about who gets access to what.

Biometrics are at once both very personal and potentially damaging if somehow

used in ways we did not expect when providing the information. Also,

since the act of collecting biometrics involves observing behavior or scanning

some body part in detail, it can seem even more invasive than it really

is. For all these reasons, it makes sense to understand the issues surrounding

privacy and biometrics.

Physical privacy concerns itself with freedom from monitoring by or
physical contact with others. Although this might initially seem to be a
potential clash between biometrics and your privacy, such a conflict is
unlikely unless someone forces you to provide a biometric sample, or
takes pictures to be used in this way when you’re in your own home or
another nonpublic place.

Although there haven’t been many challenges of an individual’s physical
right to privacy with respect to biometric information, we could imagine
challenging a police officer taking a high-resolution picture of Mike to
capture his iris image for the purposes of biometrically verifying identity
on Fourth Amendment grounds.

 

Decisional privacy is the freedom to make choices in personal matters.
There are numerous emotionally charged examples of the Supreme Court
decisions in this matter, but to stay out of those fights (most of them,
anyway), imagine a state passing a law that prevents you from getting a
tattoo. The decision to get a tattoo is a personal one, arguably affecting
nobody else, and any such law would be found to be unconstitutional.
As with physical privacy, there are few good examples of this with respect
to biometrics in real life, but one example might be the government
requiring Mike to submit his iris information when he really doesn’t want
anyone to know what color his eyes are. Requiring Mike to lift his dark
glasses and stare into the camera might be considered a violation of his
decisional privacy. Such a measure would almost certainly be challenged
as a violation of informational privacy (which we look at next) as well.

Informational privacy is far easier to understand and to find examples for.
Informational privacy is the freedom to control access to information about
oneself. Since biometric information is always tied to information about the
individual, subsequent use of that information has the potential to violate
this privacy right.