Biometrics: Are We Going Too Far?

You don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat, be a civil liberties activist, a pro-business lobbyist, or even an entrenched deep-state spook to recognize that security, convenience and privacy are in a perpetual state of conflict. Often, the solution to a real (or imagined) security threat is, somewhat counterintuitively, less privacy — or, more accurately, we are asked to trust various entities (the federal government, Google, AT&T, etc.) with more and more private data. Increasingly, this is not simply our Social Security numbers and mother’s maiden names, but it’s the unique biological bits and pieces that make us us.
We unlock our phones and other devices with our fingerprints, even though this may be our phone’s biggest vulnerability, according to The Verge. ERGO wants to use your ear, and Apple is doing what Microsoft has done with some of their Windows-based handsets and using your face to unlock your phone. If that isn’t enough, we track and store our health and location with any number of wearable devices and even “smart” mattress covers.
At virtually every major airport we are asked to step into a machine that could easily be mistaken for a cloning device and stand with our arms and legs outstretched, allowing a TSA agent to snap impossibly creepy, if not compromising, pictures of us.
In June, the South Wales Police will be scanning the faces of an estimated 170,000 Champions League Football fans in and around Principality Stadium. According to Vice, the images will then be compared, in real time, to a database of 500,000 images, alerting the police to any potential “person of interest.”

 

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