Governing by identity describes the emerging regime of a globalizing, mobile world. Governance depends on identification but identification increasingly depends on biometrics. This 'solution' to difficulties of verification is described and some technical weaknesses are discussed. The role of biometrics in classification systems is also considered and is shown to contain possible prejudice in relation to racialized criteria of identity. Lastly, the culture of biometric identification is shown to be limited to abstract data, artificially separated from (...) the lived experience of the body including the orientation to others. It is proposed that creators of national ID systems in particular address these crucial deficiencies in their attempt to provide new modes of verification. (shrink)

This book undertakes a multifaceted and integrated examination of biometric identification, including the current state of the technology, how it is being used, the key ethical issues, and the implications for law and regulation. The five chapters examine the main forms of contemporary biometrics–fingerprint recognition, facial recognition and DNA identification– as well the integration of biometric data with other forms of personal data, analyses key ethical concepts in play, including privacy, individual autonomy, collective responsibility, and joint (...) ownership rights, and proposes a raft of principles to guide the regulation of biometrics in liberal democracies. Biometric identification technology is developing rapidly and being implemented more widely, along with other forms of information technology. As products, services and communication moves online, digital identity and security is becoming more important. Biometric identification facilitates this transition. Citizens now use biometrics to access a smartphone or obtain a passport; law enforcement agencies use biometrics in association with CCTV to identify a terrorist in a crowd, or identify a suspect via their fingerprints or DNA; and companies use biometrics to identify their customers and employees. In some cases the use of biometrics is governed by law, in others the technology has developed and been implemented so quickly that, perhaps because it has been viewed as a valuable security enhancement, laws regulating its use have often not been updated to reflect new applications. However, the technology associated with biometrics raises significant ethical problems, including in relation to individual privacy, ownership of biometric data, dual use and, more generally, as is illustrated by the increasing use of biometrics in authoritarian states such as China, the potential for unregulated biometrics to undermine fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Resolving these ethical problems is a vital step towards more effective regulation. (shrink)

The proliferation of biometric identification technology raises difficult issues in the matter of security, privacy and identity. Though biometric "images" are not images per se, they are both unique representations of an individual in themsevles and a means of access to other identifying information. I compare biometric imaging with other kinds of identifying representations and find that there are issues specific to biometric ID's. Because they represent information that is written into the body they are (...) directly related to one's sense of autonomy and self-esteem. Releasing biometric ID's into the public sphere therefore involves a tangible loss of control and privacy. This does not mean that to do so is never a reasonable act, but rather that it should be carefully weighed, and should never be mandatory in order to receive any fundamental rights or benefits. (shrink)

Biometrics is often described as `the next big thingin information technology'. Rather than IT renderingthe body irrelevant to identity – a mistaken idea tobegin with – the coupling of biometrics with ITunequivocally puts the body center stage. The questions to be raised about biometrics is howbodies will become related to identity, and what thenormative and political ramifications of this couplingwill be. Unlike the body rendered knowable in thebiomedical sciences, biometrics generates a readable body: it transforms the body's surfaces andcharacteristics into (...) digital codes and ciphers to be`read' by a machine. ``Your iris is read, in the sameway that your voice can be printed, and yourfingerprint can be read'', by computers that, in turn,have become ``touch-sensitive'', and endowed with seeingand hearing capacities. Thus transformed into readable``text'', the meaning and significance of the biometricbody will be contingent upon ``context'', and therelations established with other ``texts''. Thesemetaphors open up ways to investigate the differentmeanings that will become attached to the biometricbody and the ways in which it will be tied toidentity. This paper reports on an analysis of plans andpractices surrounding the `Eurodac' project, aEuropean Union initiative to use biometrics (specif.fingerprinting) in controlling illegal immigration andborder crossings by asylum seekers. (shrink)

Discussions about biotechnology tend to assume that it is something to do with genetics or manipulating biological processes in some way. However, the field of biometrics––the measurement of physical characteristics––is also biotechnology and is likely to affect the lives of more people more quickly than any other form. The possibility of social exclusion resulting from the use of biometrics data for such uses as identity cards has not yet been fully explored. Social exclusion is unethical, as it unfairly discriminates against (...) individuals or classes of people. Social exclusion is unethical, as it unfairly discriminates against individuals or classes of people. This article looks at some of the ways in which social exclusion might arise from the use of biometric data, and introduces a model of balancing individual interests with which to analyse whether it is justified to run the risk of excluding some members of society for the benefit of others. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in finding stronger means of securitising identity against the various risks presented by the mobile globalised world. Biometric technology has featured quite prominently on the policy and security agenda of many countries. It is being promoted as the solution du jour for protecting and managing the uniqueness of identity in order to combat identity theft and fraud, crime and terrorism, illegal work and employment, and to efficiently govern various domains and (...) services including asylum, immigration and social welfare. In this paper, I shall interrogate the ways in which biometrics is about the uniqueness of identity and what kind of identity biometrics is concerned with. I argue that in posing such questions at the outset, we can start delimiting the distinctive bioethical stakes of biometrics beyond the all-too-familiar concerns of privacy, data protection and the like. I take cue mostly from Cavarero’s Arendt-inspired distinction between the “what” and the “who” elements of a person, and from Ricoeur’s distinction between the “idem” and “ipse” versions of identity. By engaging with these philosophical distinctions and concepts, and with particular reference to the example of asylum policy, I seek to examine and emphasise an important ethical issue pertaining to the practice of biometric identification. This issue relates mainly to the paradigmatic shift from the biographical story (which for so long has been the means by which an asylum application is assessed) to bio-digital samples (that are now the basis for managing and controlling the identities of asylum applicants). The purging of identity from its narrative dimension lies at the core of biometric technology’s overzealous aspiration to accuracy, precision and objectivity, and raises one of the most pressing bioethical questions vis-à-vis the realm of identification. (shrink)

Biometric technology was once the purview of security, with face recognition and fingerprint scans used for identification and law enforcement. This is no longer the case; biometrics is increasingly used for commercial and civil applications. Due to the widespread diffusion of biometrics, it is important to address the ethical issues inherent to the development and deployment of the technology. This article explores the burgeoning research on biometrics for non-security purposes and the ethical implications for organizations. This will be (...) achieved by reviewing the literature on biometrics and business ethics and drawing from disciplines such as computer ethics to inform a more robust discussion of key themes. Although there are many ethical concerns, privacy is the key issue, with associated themes. These include definitions of privacy, the privacy paradox, informed consent, regulatory frameworks and guidelines, and discrimination. Despite the proliferation of biometric technology, there is little empirical research on applied biometrics and business ethics. As such, there are several avenues for research to improve understanding of the ethical implications of using this technology. (shrink)

Odor detection and identification by machines is currently being done to evaluate perfumes, wine, olive, oil, and even find people buried in rubble. Extending body odor detection to authentication may seem far-fetched and unrealistic. Yet such an application is plausible, given that like a fingerprint or iris, the human body odor is unique. Although such technology still has strides to make before being applicable as either a stand-alone or supplemental technology to existing biometric tools, it still warrants research, (...) especially in how the technology is perceived. Numerous studies have addressed the public perception of biometric technologies, although odor scanning is one that has been under-addressed. This exploratory study addresses perceptions and attitudes of odor scanning and recommends directions for future research and practice. This study has found that odor scanning is little understood, and its benefit to security and privacy are perceived as low. Should body odor scanning develop into a viable method of biometric authentication, issues of perception and acceptance will need further attention by both research and practice. (shrink)

Biometric identity systems are now a prominent feature of contemporary law enforcement, including in Europe. Often advanced on the premise of efficiency and accuracy, they have also been the subject of significant controversy. Much attention has focussed on longer-standing biometric data collection, such as finger-printing and facial recognition, foregrounding concerns with the impact such technologies can have on the nature of policing and fundamental human rights. Less researched is the growing use of voice recognition in law enforcement. This (...) paper examines the case of the recent Speaker Identification Integrated Project, a European wide initiative to create the first international and interoperable database of voice biometrics, now the third largest biometric database at Interpol. Drawing on Freedom of Information requests, interviews and public documentation, we outline the emergence and features of SiiP and explore how voice is recognised and attributed meaning. We understand Speaker Identification Integrated Project as constituting a particular ‘regime of recognition’ premised on the use of soft biometrics to disembed voice in order to optimise for difference. This, in turn, has implications for the nature and scope of law enforcement, people's position in society, and justice concerns more broadly. (shrink)

According to a popular aphorism, biometrics are turning the human body into a passport or a password. As usual, aphorisms say more than they intend. Taking the dictum seriously, we would be two: ourself and our body. Who are we, if we are not our body? And what is our body without us? The endless history of identification systems teaches that identification is not a trivial fact but always involves a web of economic interests, political relations, symbolic networks, (...) narratives and meanings. Certainly there are reasons for the ethical and political concerns surrounding biometrics but these reasons are probably quite different from those usually alleged. (shrink)

Electroencephalogram plays an essential role in analysing and recognizing brain-related diseases. EEG has been increasingly used as a new type of biometrics in person identification and verification systems. These EEG-based systems are important components in applications for both police and civilian works, and both areas process a huge amount of EEG data. Storing and transmitting these huge amounts of data are significant challenges for data compression techniques. Lossy compression is used for EEG data as it provides a higher compression (...) ratio than lossless compression techniques. However, lossy compression can negatively influence the performance of EEG-based person identification and verification systems via the loss of information in the reconstructed data. To address this, we propose introducing performance measures as additional features in evaluating lossy compression techniques for EEG data. Our research explores if a common value of CR exists for different systems using datasets with lossy compression that could provide almost the same system performance with those using datasets without lossy compression. We performed experiments on EEG-based person identification and verification systems using two large EEG datasets, CHB MIT Scalp and Alcoholism, to investigate the relationship between standard lossy compression measures and our proposed system performance measures with the two lossy compression techniques, discrete wavelet transform—adaptive arithmetic coding and discrete wavelet transform—set partitioning in hierarchical trees. Our experimental results showed a common value of CR exists for different systems, specifically, 70 for person identification systems and 50 for person verification systems. (shrink)

Biometric identification is thought to be less vulnerable to fraud and forgery than are traditional forms of identification. However biometric identification is not without vulnerabilities. In a ‘spoofing attack’ an artificial replica of an individual’s biometric trait is used to induce a system to falsely infer that individual’s presence. Techniques such as liveness-detection and multi-modality, as well as the development of new and emerging modalities, are intended to secure biometric identification systems against (...) such threats. Unlike biometrics in general, the societal and ethical issues raised by spoofing and anti-spoofing techniques have not received much attention. This paper examines these issues. (shrink)

Several commentators have argued that the police practice of taking DNA samples during custodial arrests is an unconstitutional search and seizure. This article proposes a “biometric identification exception” to the warrant and probable-cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment that would encompass certain systems of DNA sampling on arrest.

A novel method for ECG signal outlier processing based on autoencoder neural networks is presented in the article. Typically, heartbeats with serious waveform distortions are treated as outliers and are skipped from the authentication pipeline. The main idea of the paper is to correct these waveform distortions rather them in order to provide the system with better statistical base. During the experiments, the optimum autoencoder architecture was selected. An open Physionet ECGID database was used to verify the proposed method. The (...) results of the studies were compared with previous studies that considered the correction of anomalies based on a statistical approach. On the one hand, the autoencoder shows slightly lower accuracy than the statistical method, but it greatly simplifies the construction of biometric identification systems, since it does not require precise tuning of hyperparameters. (shrink)

This book considers all aspects of privacy and security relating to an individual's DNA, with a concentration on fundamental human rights as well as specific cases and examples, in addressing greater security and privacy in the modern world.

Avec l’identification biométrique, nous passons imperceptiblement du contrôle à distance des populations pratiqué par les États modernes à des macro-systèmes techniques qui imposent de plus en plus leur propre logique. Du point de vue anthropologique ce déplacement de paradigme met en jeu la définition même de l’identité en renforçant le divorce entre l’identité civile et l’identité personnelle ou sociale. La frontière est désormais inscrite à même le corps biologique des individus au sein de l’espace géré depuis les terminaux du (...) grand réseau mondial de gestion des flux disséminés sur la planète. Elle tend donc à se confondre avec les limites fonctionnelles du Macro-Système technique. Du point de vue du droit, la mise en place par les États de dispositifs d’identification biométriques s’exprime principalement par la restriction de la liberté de circuler accordée aux individus. L’un des constats apporté par la revue des législations nationales montre pourtant que le droit s’adapte globalement à cette nouvelle situation. Cet article interroge en conclusion quelques-unes des raisons permettant d’expliquer ces reculs successifs et propose, parmi elles, la définition implicite de l’individu sur laquelle fait fond le droit moderne.With biometric identification we are imperceptibly moving from the remote control of the population practised by the modern States on to large technical systems which increasingly impose their own logic on people. From an anthropological viewpoint, this paradigm shift calls into question the very definition of « identity » by broadening the divide between civil identity and personal or social identity. The frontier is now inscribed on the biological body of the individual within the space that is managed from the terminals of the global flow management networks scattered the world over. The frontier thus tends increasingly to coincide with the functional limits of the large technical system. From a legal viewpoint, the introduction by States of biometric identification systems results primarily in a restriction of the freedom of circulation granted to individuals. One of the findings which emerge from a review of national legislations is however that law is globally adapting to this new situation. In the conclusion, the article considers some of the reasons behind these successive backward steps, and proposes, amongst them, an implicit definition of the individual on which modern law is founded. (shrink)

Biometrics readers are deployed in many public sites and are used for user identification and verification. Nowadays, most biometrics readers can be connected to local area networks, and consequently, they are potential targets for network attacks. This article investigates the robustness of several fingerprint and iris readers against common denial of service attacks. This investigation has been conducted using a set of laboratory experiments and DoS attack generator tools. The experiments show clearly that the tested biometric readers are (...) very vulnerable to common DoS attacks, and their recognition performances deteriorate significantly once they are under DoS attacks. Finally, the article lists some security consideration that should be taken into consideration when designing secure biometrics readers. (shrink)

PurposeThis study aims to explore the ethical and social issues of tattoo recognition technology and tattoo similarity detection technology, which are expected to be increasingly used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper investigates the new ethical concerns raised by tattoo-based biometrics on a comparative basis with face-recognition biometrics.FindingsTRT raises much more ethically sensitive issues than face recognition, because tattoos are meaningful biometric traits, and tattoo identification is tantamount to the identification of many (...) more personal features that normally would have remained invisible. TSDT’s assumption that classifying people in virtue of their visible features is useful to foretell their attitudes and behaviours is dangerously similar to racist thought.Practical implicationsThe findings hope to promote an active debate on the ethical and social aspects of tattoo-based biometrics before it is intensely implemented by law enforcement agencies.Social implicationsTattooed individuals – inasmuch as they are more controlled and monitored – are negatively discriminated in comparison to un-tattooed individuals. As tattooing is not uniformly distributed among population, many demographic groups like African–Americans will be overrepresented in tattoos databases used by TRT and TSDT, thus being affected by disproportionately higher risk to be found as a match for a given suspect.Originality/valueTRT and TSDT represent one of the new frontiers of biometrics. The ethical and social issues raised by TRT and TSDT are currently unexplored. (shrink)

This paper situates the data privacy debate in the context of what I call the death of the data subject. My central claim is that concept of a rights-bearing data subject is being pulled in two contradictory directions at once, and that simultaneous attention to these is necessary to understand and resist the extractive practices of the data industry. Specifically, it is necessary to treat the problems facing the data subject structurally, rather than by narrowly attempting to vindicate its rights. (...) On the one hand, the data industry argues that subjects of biometric identification lack legal standing to pursue claims in court, and Facebook recently denied that that its facial recognition software recognizes faces. On the other hand, industry takes consent to terms of service and arbitration clauses to create enforceable legal subject positions, while using promises of personalization to create a phenomenological subject that is unaware of the extent to which it is being manipulated. Data subjects thus have no legal existence when it is a matter of corporate liability, but legal accountability when it is a matter of their own liability. Successful reform should address the power asymmetries between individuals and data companies that enable this structural disempowerment. (shrink)

Feminists today are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. Mattering, edited by noted feminist scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor, presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or ‘naturalizing’ turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements of (...) matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power, taking materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues. The contributors, an international group of feminist theorists, scientists and scholars, apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neuralplasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs.A unique and interdisciplinary collection, Mattering presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing and transformations in the sciences. (shrink)

Normative theorists of migration are beginning to shift their focus away from an earlier obsession with whether the ‘liberal' or ‘legitimate’ state should have a right to exclude, and toward evaluation of how states engage in immigration control. However, with some notable exceptions – such as work of Rebecca Buxton, David Owen, Serena Parekh, and Alex Sager – this work tends not to focus on the global coordination of such control, and is still largely concerned with issues of membership. In (...) this paper I aim to show the value of shifting normative attention to the fundamentally interdependent nature of state control of migration, and the management of all forms of movement – not just settlement. This global management is greatly facilitated by the rapid digitisation of border controls. As such, I outline three aspects of the way digital border controls work – profiling, biometric identification, and the data sharing practices upon which they rest – and highlight ethical challenges of accountability, consent and the reach of the state, and entrenching global inequalities in access to movement. Ultimately, I hope to show that the globally interconnected nature of migration management is a combination of practices that normative theorists of migration should turn their attention to. (shrink)

Privacy and technology clash in the courts. I elaborate the example of Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017), an example from the High Court of India, whose sweeping and inclusive jurisprudential style raises starkly the question of the influence that academic philosophers and other scholars have over how legitimate societal interests in exploiting information technology and protecting personal privacy are “balanced” by the courts. Philosophers will be satisfied to see that their theories are acknowledged in a landmark national decision finding (...) that India’s 1.3 billion people have a constitutional, fundamental right to privacy that constrains a challenged government biometric identification system. Some scholars will appreciate the inclusive definition of privacy, which included decisional privacy, combined with the treatment of privacy as a paramount human good meriting the protection of fundamental rights. But some academic philosophers are potentially disappointed that the Court synthesizes rather than differentiates among their competing theories, concepts, and definitions, and, in the end, relies upon liberal Enlightenment ideals that some scholars have argued are singularly ill-suited for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper investigates a structural void that, especially in the context of poor or developing nations, prevents economic growth from being more inclusive and benefiting wider sections of society. The authors initially examine the imperative for inclusive growth, one encompassing a focus on poverty and development. Utilizing social choice theory, and a capability deprivation perspective, we observe that the poor experience deprivations due to a deficiency in their personal autonomy. This in turn is deeply interwoven with the concept of identity. (...) Legally recognizing the poor as individuals, and providing them with proof of their identity, will empower them and facilitate inclusive growth and poverty alleviation. These conceptual arguments are illustrated with the description of a biometric-linked developmental initiative that is providing proof of identity to 1.2 billion residents of India. By establishing a robust identity management system, the project aims to ensure more inclusive growth and efficiently target welfare programs. The authors further investigate how the establishment of identity rights facilitates financial inclusion, property ownership, and necessity-driven entrepreneurial action. Biometric identification on this scale is, however, fraught with dangers to civil liberties and has other serious ethical consequences. In the last section, issues around privacy and security are debated while highlighting the need for external review and independent monitoring to define the project’s boundaries and usages. (shrink)

Vital statistics have been politically fraught in South Africa for decades, not least because the state made very little effort to record information about the well-being of African women and children. This chapter shows that in the last years of the nineteenth century a working system of vital registration was developed in the colony of Natal and in the native reserves of the Transkei. From the beginning this delegated bureaucracy faced opposition from African patriarchs, from parsimonious white elected leaders and (...) from the advocates of coercive systems of biometric identification. In the early 1920s, under the weight of mostly unfounded accusations of corruption, the system of registration by means of ‘native agency’ was deliberately terminated, despite the general enthusiasm of the magistrates charged with maintaining it. (shrink)

The events of 9/11 have underlined the relevance of the thought of Georgio Agamben in so far as he attempts to explain the genesis of an authoritarianism that increasingly implements extraordinary measures and enhanced surveillance. This can be understood in terms of the expansion of a biopolitical regime. Biometric analysis: finger printing, iris and retina scans etc., are to be understood in their relation to the individual as bare life, the individual stripped of his/her political legal identity and thus (...) identified without reference to the latter. The camp, according to Agamben, is said to be the ultimate space, a lawless zone, where questions of legality and illegality become irrelevant. However, this paper argues that Agamben fails to underline the importance of the Cartesian legacy that initiated a form of conceptualization in which the ordering of reality replaced qualitative distinctions with mathematical quantification. Biometric analysis, which relies heavily on mathematized quantification of biological features, is integral to the biopolitical regime, as described by Michel Foucault and Agamben. This paper argues that a rejection of this Cartesian inheritance is necessary if we are to overcome insidious forms of control based on surveillance, biometric identification or even managerial oversight through supposedly quantifiable metrics of performance. (shrink)

In this discussion piece we address how the UK government has attempted to manage public expectations of a proposed biometric identity scheme by focussing attention on the handheld, i.e., the ID card. We suggest that this strategy of expectations management seeks to downplay the complexity and uncertainty surrounding this high-technological initiative, necessitating the selective use of expertise for the purpose of furthering government objectives. In this process, government often relegates counterexpertise, if not dismissing it outright, thereby greatly politicizing the (...) policy deliberation process. We argue that this manoeuvring by government spells trouble for both democratic deliberation on the issue of biometric identification in the UK and, more generally, expertise-based policy making in related technological ventures. (shrink)

Identification technologies like biometrics have long been associated with securitisation, coercion and surveillance but have also, in recent years, become constitutive of a politics of empowerment, particularly in contexts of international aid. Aid organisations tend to see digital identification technologies as tools of recognition and inclusion rather than oppressive forms of monitoring, tracking and top-down control. In addition, practices that many critical scholars describe as aiding surveillance are often experienced differently by humanitarian subjects. This commentary examines the fraught (...) questions this raises for scholars of international aid, surveillance studies and critical data studies. We put forward a research agenda that tackles head-on how critical theories of data and society can better account for the ambivalent dynamics of ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ that digital aid interventions instantiate. (shrink)

Traditional literature considers complex biometric sources such as words, letters and signatures for writer verification/identification. In this work the use of small segments of the handwritten stroke for writer verification is proposed. A grapheme is defined as the concatenation of smaller segments or fragments. Two models of grapheme are developed based on the idea that the segments are parts of a circle with or without direction. The average of Gray Level of the Perpendicular Line to the Skeleton and (...) Local Binary Pattern are adopted as descriptors. A database of 3,000 images of 50 writers, with 6 types of segments and with 10 samples per segment has been developed. A binary output support vector machine was applied as classifier. Thus, 50 classifiers were trained using 100 balanced data sets generated using subsampling of the majority class. Experiments are carried out with the proposed models, with an identity verification hit rate of 97 % on average. The positive results of experiments show that it is possible to achieve high precision in writer verification using segment of graphemes. (shrink)

Every person has his/her own unique signature that is used mainly for the purposes of personal identification and verification of important documents or legal transactions. There are two kinds of signature verification: static and dynamic. Static(off-line) verification is the process of verifying an electronic or document signature after it has been made, while dynamic(on-line) verification takes place as a person creates his/her signature on a digital tablet or a similar device. Offline signature verification is not efficient and slow for (...) a large number of documents. To overcome the drawbacks of offline signature verification, we have seen a growth in online biometric personal verification such as fingerprints, eye scan etc. In this paper we created CNN model using python for offline signature and after training and validating, the accuracy of testing was 99.70%. (shrink)

Health research increasingly relies on organized collections of health data and biological samples. There are many types of sample and data collections that are used for health research, though these are collected for many purposes, not all of which are health-related. These collections exist under different jurisdictional and regulatory arrangements and include: 1) Population biobanks, cohort studies, and genome databases 2) Clinical and public health data 3) Direct-to-consumer genetic testing 4) Social media 5) Fitness trackers, health apps, and biometric (...) data sensors Population biobanks, cohort studies, and genome databases Clinical and public health data Direct-to-consumer genetic testing Social media Fitness trackers, health apps, and biometric data sensors Ethical, legal, and social challenges of such collections are well recognized, but there has been limited attention to the broader societal implications of the existence of these collections. Although health research conducted using these collections is broadly recognized as beneficent, secondary uses of these data and samples may be controversial. We examine both documented and hypothetical scenarios of secondary uses of health data and samples. In particular, we focus on the use of health data for purposes of: Forensic investigations Civil lawsuits Identification of victims of mass casualty events Denial of entry for border security and immigration Making health resource rationing decisions Facilitating human rights abuses in autocratic regimes Forensic investigations Civil lawsuits Identification of victims of mass casualty events Denial of entry for border security and immigration Making health resource rationing decisions Facilitating human rights abuses in autocratic regimes Current safeguards relating to the use of health data and samples include research ethics oversight and privacy laws. These safeguards have a strong focus on informed consent and anonymization, which are aimed at the protection of the individual research subject. They are not intended to address broader societal implications of health data and sample collections. As such, existing arrangements are insufficient to protect against subversion of health databases for non-sanctioned secondary uses, or to provide guidance for reasonable but controversial secondary uses. We are concerned that existing debate in the scholarly literature and beyond has not sufficiently recognized the secondary data uses we outline in this paper. Our main purpose, therefore, is to raise awareness of the potential for unforeseen and unintended consequences, in particular negative consequences, of the increased availability and development of health data collections for research, by providing a comprehensive review of documented and hypothetical non-health research uses of such data. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article(s): ‘Full Disclosure of the “Raw Data” of Research on Humans: Citizens’ Rights, Product Manufacturer’s Obligations and the Quality of the Scientific Database.’Philosophy Compass 6/2 (2011): 90–99. doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2010.00376.x Author’s Introduction Securing consent (and informed consent) from patients and research study participants is a key concern in patient care and research on humans. Yet, the legal doctrines of consent and informed consent differ in their applications. In patient care, the judicial doctrines of consent and informed (...) consent are disclosure doctrines based on the obligation of physicians to inform their patients of the following types of information: the nature of the procedure the physician is recommending in the patent’s care (P), the alternatives to the physician‐recommendation (A), and the risks of procedure and its alternatives (R). In addition, the physician must provide truthful answers to the patient’s questions (Q) to the best of the physician’s abilities. In research on humans, the onus of disclosure by study sponsors and principal investigators is much greater than in patient care precisely because the purpose of research is not patient care. The purpose of research is the identification and development of new generalizable knowledge. Thus, participation in a research study or trial may not benefit the study volunteer at all. In addition, the participant may carry a heavy risk burden in relationship to any testing of a newly designed drug or device as part of their experiences in the research study. Presently, despite the risks borne by the research study participant, the raw data collected from volunteers in research trials are treated by courts as if they were the private property of the study sponsor rather than generally owed to the public as would be expected by an effort like research participation aimed at contributing to the development of generalizable knowledge. This paper reviews the obligations that study sponsors owe to their study participants based on the very definition of research as a systematic activity whose purpose is to develop generalizable knowledge to help all humans. Author Recommends Court cases Canterbury v. Spence, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit 464 F.2d 772 (1972). (Federal appellate decision heard in the District of Columbia, USA) Reibl v. Hughes, 2 S.C.R. 880 (1980). (Supreme Court of Canada) Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L. R. 479 (1992). (High Court of Australia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Canterbury v. Spence is the landmark Federal informed consent case in the United States heard in the District of Columbia. In this case, Judge Spottswood Robinson articulated the reasonable person standard of informed consent. This standard was subsequently adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada (Reibl v. Hughes, 2 S.C.R. 880 (1980)) and the High Court of Australia (Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L. R. 479 (1992)). The House of Lords rejected the reasonable person standard in England in Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985). Book Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. This book is a detailed guide for the review of scientific and ethical aspects of research on humans contained in the research study protocols and research informed consent forms which need to be submitted by study sponsors and principal investigators to institutional review boards (IRBs) for IRB review before a research study can receive approval to be conducted within a human study population in those institutions over which the IRB has authority. It also presents basic definitions in the area of research on humans and basic approaches to help conduct a deep review of the underlying scientific and ethical issues that are present within a research study protocol and its accompanying research informed consent form. Report National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: DHEW Publications, 1978 (78‐0012). This U.S. National Commission in the Belmont Report argued for the necessity of a reasonable volunteer standard in research on humans in the United States. Arguing that the professional standard and the reasonable person standard of consent and informed consent were insufficient to base a disclosure standard in research on humans, this National Commission developed the reasonable volunteer standard where a study participant is to be approached in research informed consent with that information that a reasonable volunteer would want to know. Online Materials Belmont Report: Syllabus Topics for Lecture and Discussion Week I: Introduction and Overview Readings: Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L.R. 479 (1992). (High Court of Australia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Week II: The Different Standards of Consent and Informed Consent Readings: Canterbury v. Spence, 464 F.2d 772 (1972). (Federal appellate opinion heard in the District of Columbia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Week III: Definition of Research Reading: Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Especially Chapters 2 and 3) Week IV: How to Review a Research Study Protocol and Research Informed Consent Form Reading: Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Especially Chapters 4–6, 10, and 12–14) Week V: Obligations in Research of Humans Versus Patient Care Reading: National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: DHEW Publications, 1978 (78‐0012). Focus Questions • How do the judicial doctrines of consent in England and Australia compare to the judicial doctrines of informed consent in the United States and Canada? • How does a professional standard of disclosure differ from a reasonable person standard of disclosure? • What is the definition of research? • How is a research study (study proposal and research informed consent form) reviewed from scientific and ethical bases for considerations of approval by an IRB? • How do the obligations of a study sponsor, a principal investigator, and a research team conducting a research trial on human study participants differ from the obligations of a physician caring for a patient? • Should all raw data of research derived from humans be made available to the public for use in developing generalizable knowledge to help others, or should raw data be considered the private property of the study sponsors (for example, prescription drug manufacturers), who fund the research trials? Seminar/project Idea Draw a timeline of the development of the basic concepts of consent and informed consent in patient care and in patient research. On this timeline, first place the dates of the key court cases in England, the United States, Canada, and Australia on consent and informed consent. Then place the date of the development of the Belmont Report. Why do differences exist between these four countries in terms of the legal requirements of informedness of a patient (in medical care) and a study participant (in medical research)? What roles if any do the concepts of self‐determination and self‐decision have in consent and informed consent in patient care and in informed consent in research on humans among the four countries of interest? What are the realities of research on human participants that require a new standard of informed consent, the reasonable volunteer standard, to be developed beyond the two standards in patient care, the professional standard, and the reasonable person standard? Counterpoint Arguments The following are counterpoint arguments that need to be appreciated to more fully understand the concepts that impact the thesis that ‘raw data’ should be open to the public to allow the opportunity of checking of the results of its associated scientific paper and for further analysis. De‐Identified (Anonymized) Raw Data A current approach to identifying (anonymizinig) raw data is based on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (P.L.104‐191). HIPAA was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996 to keep a person’s medical information private. In a research study, a person’s private medical information can become research data. HIPAA’s Privacy Rule allows a covered entity to de‐identify data by removing all 18 elements that could be used to identify the individual or the individual’s relatives, employers, or household members; these elements are enumerated in the Privacy Rule. The covered entity must also have no actual knowledge that the remaining information could be used alone or in combination with other information to identify the individual who is the subject of the information. Under this method, the identifiers that must be removed are the following: 1 Names. 2 All geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, including street address, city, county, precinct, ZIP Code, and their equivalent geographical codes, except for the initial three digits of a ZIP Code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: 2a. The geographic unit formed by combining all ZIP Codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people. 2b. The initial three digits of a ZIP Code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people are changed to 000. 3 All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to an individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, and date of death, and all ages over 89 and all elements of dates (including year) indicative of such age, except that such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older. 4 Telephone numbers. 5 Facsimile numbers. 6 Electronic mail addresses. 7 Social security numbers. 8 Medical record numbers. 9 Health plan beneficiary numbers. 10 Account numbers. 11 Certificate/license numbers. 12 Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers. 13 Device identifiers and serial numbers. 14 Web universal resource locators (URLs). 15 Internet protocol (IP) address numbers. 16 Biometric identifiers, including fingerprints and voiceprints. 17 Full‐face photographic images and any comparable images. 18 Any other unique identifying number, characteristic, or code, unless otherwise permitted by the Privacy Rule for re‐identification. Even though ‘raw data’ can be de‐identified (anonymized) so that there is no way to trace back the data to the study participant from which it was drawn, there are still questions whether the ‘de‐identified raw data’ can be given to other researchers or made public without the original study participant’s approval. It may be the case that this approval could be done at the start of any research study where the individual considering study participation would be counseled on what the process of de‐identification consists of and would be asked whether the participant would allow use of the data by other researchers or made available to the public in a de‐identified state. However, there may be questions of the study participants as to whether the data are truly de‐identified and untraceable back to the study participant since the participant would not be able to see the process actually being carried out in detail in all relevant circumstances. Using Raw Data in Context Simply being in possession of raw data is never enough to build on that data from a research perspective. Researchers need to understand the context of the scientific research study in which the data were collected. This research context includes (but is not limited to): (i) the scientific hypothesis of the research study, (ii) the inclusion and exclusion criteria selected by the research designers of the study to determine which study participants were included and which were excluded from the study, (iii) the methods used to collect the data and possibilities of errors in the data collection processes, and (iv) answers to questions regarding whether any data were excluded from the study data and why these data were excluded. Ownership Rights Over Data There are ownership rights over data. Ownership rights include court decision making related to the question which parties are to be considered as the owners of the data. Possible owners here include (but are not limited to) (i) the study sponsor whose only role was to fund that study, (ii) the principal investigator(s) who developed the scientific hypothesis, and (iii) individual study participants through special contracts made by individual participants who negotiate such contracts with study sponsors and principal investigators to share in the ownership of data. Examples of such data are participant sources of unique gene lines or unique cell lines to be used in future research. Objections to Data Sharing Finally, individual researchers may simply object to sharing data. A researcher’s arguments here may be simply stating that he or she has a right to fully analyze the data since the collection of the data was the researchers’ idea in the first place. These researchers may argue that they have the right to mine the data as fully as they can before deciding to make the data open to the public for others to analyze. Works Cited 1 Kaiser, J. ‘Making Clinical Data Widely Available.’Science 322.5899 (10 Oct. 2008): 217–8. 2 de Lusignan, S., J.F. Metsemakers, P. Houwink, V. Gunnarsdottir, and J. van der Lei. ‘Routinely Collected General Practice Data: Goldmines for Research? A Report of the European Federation for Medical Informatics Primary Care Informatics Working Group (EFMI PCIWG) from MIE2006, Maastricht, The Netherlands.’Informatics in Primary Care 14.3 (2006): 203–9. 3 Sim, I. ‘Human Studies Database Project’, CTSA Data Repositories Symposium (17 Oct. 2008). 23 Nov. 2010. 4 Sim, I., C.G. Chute, H. Lehmann, R. Nagarajan, M. Nahm, and R.H. Scheuermann. ‘Keeping Raw Data in Context.’Science 323.5915 (6 Feb. 2009): 713. 5 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, HIPAA Privacy Rule, Information for Researchers. 13 Nov. 2010. 6 Wilczynski, N.L., R.B. Haynes, and Hedges Team. ‘EMBASE Search Strategies for Identifying Methodologically Sound Diagnostic Studies for Use by Clinicians and Researchers.’BMC Medicine 29.3 (March 2005): 7. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article(s): ‘Full Disclosure of the “Raw Data” of Research on Humans: Citizens’ Rights, Product Manufacturer’s Obligations and the Quality of the Scientific Database.’Philosophy Compass 6/2 (2011): 90–99. doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2010.00376.x Author’s Introduction Securing consent (and informed consent) from patients and research study participants is a key concern in patient care and research on humans. Yet, the legal doctrines of consent and informed consent differ in their applications. In patient care, the judicial doctrines of consent and informed (...) consent are disclosure doctrines based on the obligation of physicians to inform their patients of the following types of information: the nature of the procedure the physician is recommending in the patent’s care (P), the alternatives to the physician‐recommendation (A), and the risks of procedure and its alternatives (R). In addition, the physician must provide truthful answers to the patient’s questions (Q) to the best of the physician’s abilities. In research on humans, the onus of disclosure by study sponsors and principal investigators is much greater than in patient care precisely because the purpose of research is not patient care. The purpose of research is the identification and development of new generalizable knowledge. Thus, participation in a research study or trial may not benefit the study volunteer at all. In addition, the participant may carry a heavy risk burden in relationship to any testing of a newly designed drug or device as part of their experiences in the research study. Presently, despite the risks borne by the research study participant, the raw data collected from volunteers in research trials are treated by courts as if they were the private property of the study sponsor rather than generally owed to the public as would be expected by an effort like research participation aimed at contributing to the development of generalizable knowledge. This paper reviews the obligations that study sponsors owe to their study participants based on the very definition of research as a systematic activity whose purpose is to develop generalizable knowledge to help all humans. Author Recommends Court cases Canterbury v. Spence, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit 464 F.2d 772 (1972). (Federal appellate decision heard in the District of Columbia, USA) Reibl v. Hughes, 2 S.C.R. 880 (1980). (Supreme Court of Canada) Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L. R. 479 (1992). (High Court of Australia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Canterbury v. Spence is the landmark Federal informed consent case in the United States heard in the District of Columbia. In this case, Judge Spottswood Robinson articulated the reasonable person standard of informed consent. This standard was subsequently adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada (Reibl v. Hughes, 2 S.C.R. 880 (1980)) and the High Court of Australia (Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L. R. 479 (1992)). The House of Lords rejected the reasonable person standard in England in Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985). Book Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. This book is a detailed guide for the review of scientific and ethical aspects of research on humans contained in the research study protocols and research informed consent forms which need to be submitted by study sponsors and principal investigators to institutional review boards (IRBs) for IRB review before a research study can receive approval to be conducted within a human study population in those institutions over which the IRB has authority. It also presents basic definitions in the area of research on humans and basic approaches to help conduct a deep review of the underlying scientific and ethical issues that are present within a research study protocol and its accompanying research informed consent form. Report National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: DHEW Publications, 1978 (78‐0012). This U.S. National Commission in the Belmont Report argued for the necessity of a reasonable volunteer standard in research on humans in the United States. Arguing that the professional standard and the reasonable person standard of consent and informed consent were insufficient to base a disclosure standard in research on humans, this National Commission developed the reasonable volunteer standard where a study participant is to be approached in research informed consent with that information that a reasonable volunteer would want to know. Online Materials Belmont Report: Syllabus Topics for Lecture and Discussion Week I: Introduction and Overview Readings: Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L.R. 479 (1992). (High Court of Australia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Week II: The Different Standards of Consent and Informed Consent Readings: Canterbury v. Spence, 464 F.2d 772 (1972). (Federal appellate opinion heard in the District of Columbia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Week III: Definition of Research Reading: Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Especially Chapters 2 and 3) Week IV: How to Review a Research Study Protocol and Research Informed Consent Form Reading: Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Especially Chapters 4–6, 10, and 12–14) Week V: Obligations in Research of Humans Versus Patient Care Reading: National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: DHEW Publications, 1978 (78‐0012). Focus Questions • How do the judicial doctrines of consent in England and Australia compare to the judicial doctrines of informed consent in the United States and Canada? • How does a professional standard of disclosure differ from a reasonable person standard of disclosure? • What is the definition of research? • How is a research study (study proposal and research informed consent form) reviewed from scientific and ethical bases for considerations of approval by an IRB? • How do the obligations of a study sponsor, a principal investigator, and a research team conducting a research trial on human study participants differ from the obligations of a physician caring for a patient? • Should all raw data of research derived from humans be made available to the public for use in developing generalizable knowledge to help others, or should raw data be considered the private property of the study sponsors (for example, prescription drug manufacturers), who fund the research trials? Seminar/project Idea Draw a timeline of the development of the basic concepts of consent and informed consent in patient care and in patient research. On this timeline, first place the dates of the key court cases in England, the United States, Canada, and Australia on consent and informed consent. Then place the date of the development of the Belmont Report. Why do differences exist between these four countries in terms of the legal requirements of informedness of a patient (in medical care) and a study participant (in medical research)? What roles if any do the concepts of self‐determination and self‐decision have in consent and informed consent in patient care and in informed consent in research on humans among the four countries of interest? What are the realities of research on human participants that require a new standard of informed consent, the reasonable volunteer standard, to be developed beyond the two standards in patient care, the professional standard, and the reasonable person standard? Counterpoint Arguments The following are counterpoint arguments that need to be appreciated to more fully understand the concepts that impact the thesis that ‘raw data’ should be open to the public to allow the opportunity of checking of the results of its associated scientific paper and for further analysis. De‐Identified (Anonymized) Raw Data A current approach to identifying (anonymizinig) raw data is based on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (P.L.104‐191). HIPAA was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996 to keep a person’s medical information private. In a research study, a person’s private medical information can become research data. HIPAA’s Privacy Rule allows a covered entity to de‐identify data by removing all 18 elements that could be used to identify the individual or the individual’s relatives, employers, or household members; these elements are enumerated in the Privacy Rule. The covered entity must also have no actual knowledge that the remaining information could be used alone or in combination with other information to identify the individual who is the subject of the information. Under this method, the identifiers that must be removed are the following: 1 Names. 2 All geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, including street address, city, county, precinct, ZIP Code, and their equivalent geographical codes, except for the initial three digits of a ZIP Code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: 2a. The geographic unit formed by combining all ZIP Codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people. 2b. The initial three digits of a ZIP Code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people are changed to 000. 3 All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to an individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, and date of death, and all ages over 89 and all elements of dates (including year) indicative of such age, except that such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older. 4 Telephone numbers. 5 Facsimile numbers. 6 Electronic mail addresses. 7 Social security numbers. 8 Medical record numbers. 9 Health plan beneficiary numbers. 10 Account numbers. 11 Certificate/license numbers. 12 Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers. 13 Device identifiers and serial numbers. 14 Web universal resource locators (URLs). 15 Internet protocol (IP) address numbers. 16 Biometric identifiers, including fingerprints and voiceprints. 17 Full‐face photographic images and any comparable images. 18 Any other unique identifying number, characteristic, or code, unless otherwise permitted by the Privacy Rule for re‐identification. Even though ‘raw data’ can be de‐identified (anonymized) so that there is no way to trace back the data to the study participant from which it was drawn, there are still questions whether the ‘de‐identified raw data’ can be given to other researchers or made public without the original study participant’s approval. It may be the case that this approval could be done at the start of any research study where the individual considering study participation would be counseled on what the process of de‐identification consists of and would be asked whether the participant would allow use of the data by other researchers or made available to the public in a de‐identified state. However, there may be questions of the study participants as to whether the data are truly de‐identified and untraceable back to the study participant since the participant would not be able to see the process actually being carried out in detail in all relevant circumstances. Using Raw Data in Context Simply being in possession of raw data is never enough to build on that data from a research perspective. Researchers need to understand the context of the scientific research study in which the data were collected. This research context includes (but is not limited to): (i) the scientific hypothesis of the research study, (ii) the inclusion and exclusion criteria selected by the research designers of the study to determine which study participants were included and which were excluded from the study, (iii) the methods used to collect the data and possibilities of errors in the data collection processes, and (iv) answers to questions regarding whether any data were excluded from the study data and why these data were excluded. Ownership Rights Over Data There are ownership rights over data. Ownership rights include court decision making related to the question which parties are to be considered as the owners of the data. Possible owners here include (but are not limited to) (i) the study sponsor whose only role was to fund that study, (ii) the principal investigator(s) who developed the scientific hypothesis, and (iii) individual study participants through special contracts made by individual participants who negotiate such contracts with study sponsors and principal investigators to share in the ownership of data. Examples of such data are participant sources of unique gene lines or unique cell lines to be used in future research. Objections to Data Sharing Finally, individual researchers may simply object to sharing data. A researcher’s arguments here may be simply stating that he or she has a right to fully analyze the data since the collection of the data was the researchers’ idea in the first place. These researchers may argue that they have the right to mine the data as fully as they can before deciding to make the data open to the public for others to analyze. Works Cited 1 Kaiser, J. ‘Making Clinical Data Widely Available.’Science 322.5899 (10 Oct. 2008): 217–8. 2 de Lusignan, S., J.F. Metsemakers, P. Houwink, V. Gunnarsdottir, and J. van der Lei. ‘Routinely Collected General Practice Data: Goldmines for Research? A Report of the European Federation for Medical Informatics Primary Care Informatics Working Group (EFMI PCIWG) from MIE2006, Maastricht, The Netherlands.’Informatics in Primary Care 14.3 (2006): 203–9. 3 Sim, I. ‘Human Studies Database Project’, CTSA Data Repositories Symposium (17 Oct. 2008). 23 Nov. 2010. 4 Sim, I., C.G. Chute, H. Lehmann, R. Nagarajan, M. Nahm, and R.H. Scheuermann. ‘Keeping Raw Data in Context.’Science 323.5915 (6 Feb. 2009): 713. 5 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, HIPAA Privacy Rule, Information for Researchers. 13 Nov. 2010. 6 Wilczynski, N.L., R.B. Haynes, and Hedges Team. ‘EMBASE Search Strategies for Identifying Methodologically Sound Diagnostic Studies for Use by Clinicians and Researchers.’BMC Medicine 29.3 (March 2005): 7. (shrink)

COVID-19 has hit a world in which social protection schemes are increasingly augmented with digital measures. Digital identity schemes are especially being adopted to match citizens’ data with social protection entitlements, enabling authentication through demographic and, increasingly, biometric data at the point of access. In this commentary, I discuss three sets of implications that COVID-19 has yielded on digital social protection, whose central trade-off – increasing the probabilities of accurate user identification, at the cost of greater exclusions – (...) has become even more problematic during the crisis. I argue that three forms of data injustice – legal, informational and design-related, previously identified in datafied social protection schemes, will need to be monitored in the post-pandemic scenario. I finally observe that the crisis exposes the long-term need to place digitality within social protection schemes that expand user entitlements rather than constraining them. Implications of such reflections are drawn for the study of data-based social welfare interventions. (shrink)

Nowadays, there has been an increase in security concerns regarding fingerprint biometrics. This problem arises due to technological advancements in bypassing and hacking methodologies. This has sparked the need for a more secure platform for identification. In this paper, we have used a deep Convolutional Neural Network as a pre-verification filter to filter out bad or malicious fingerprints. As deep learning allows the system to be more accurate at detecting and reducing false identification by training itself again and (...) again with test samples, the proposed method improves the security and accuracy by multiple folds. The implementation of a novel secure fingerprint verification platform that takes the optical image of a fingerprint as input is explained in this paper. The given input is pre-verified using Google’s pre-trained inception model for deep learning applications, and then passed through a minutia-based algorithm for user authentication. Then, the results are compared with existing models. (shrink)

The vast advances in biometrics over the past several decades have brought with them a host of pressing concerns. Philosophical scrutiny has already been devoted to many of the relevant ethical and political issues, especially ones arising from matters of privacy, bias, and security in data collection. But philosophers have devoted surprisingly little attention to the relevant metaphysical issues, in particular, ones concerning matters of personal identity. This paper aims to take some initial steps to correct this oversight. After discussing (...) the philosophical problem of personal identity, the ways in which the notion of biometric identity connects with, or fails to connect with, the philosophical notion of personal identity is explored. Though there may be some good reasons to use biometric identity to track personal identity, it is contended that biometric identity is not the same thing as personal identity and thus that biometrics researchers should stop talking as if it were. (shrink)

Biometric facial recognition is an artificial intelligence technology involving the automated comparison of facial features, used by law enforcement to identify unknown suspects from photographs and closed circuit television. Its capability is expanding rapidly in association with artificial intelligence and has great potential to solve crime. However, it also carries significant privacy and other ethical implications that require law and regulation. This article examines the rise of biometric facial recognition, current applications and legal developments, and conducts an ethical (...) analysis of the issues that arise. Ethical principles are applied to mediate the potential conflicts in relation to this information technology that arise between security, on the one hand, and individual privacy and autonomy, and democratic accountability, on the other. These can be used to support appropriate law and regulation for the technology as it continues to develop. (shrink)

Biometrics is essentially a pattern recognition system that recognizes an individual using their unique anatomical or behavioral patterns such as face, fingerprint, iris, signature etc. Recent researches have shown that many biometric traits are vulnerable to spoof attacks. Moreover, recent works showed that, contrary to a common belief, multimodal biometric systems in parallel fusion mode can be intruded even if only one trait is spoofed. However, most of the results were obtained using simulated spoof attacks, under the assumption (...) that the spoofed and genuine samples are indistinguishable, which may not be true for all biometric traits. In addition, so far vulnerability of multimodal biometric systems in serial fusion mode against spoof attacks has not been investigated. These issues raise a demand to investigate the robustness of multimodal systems under realistic spoof attacks. In this paper, we empirically investigate the performance of serial and parallel biometric fusion modes under realistic spoof attacks. Preliminary empirical results on real biometric systems made up of face, fingerprint and iris confirm that multimodal biometric systems in both fusion modes are not intrinsically robust against spoof attacks as believed so far. In particular, multimodal biometric systems in serial fusion mode can be even less robust than systems in parallel mode. We also experimentally found that incorporating the biometric sample quality in biometric fusion increases the robustness of the multimodal systems against spoof attacks. In the end, we study the trade-off between performance and robustness of the biometric systems under spoof attacks. (shrink)

This paper reviews the social scientific literature on biometric surveillance, with particular attention to its potential harms. It maps the harms caused by biometric surveillance, traces their theoretical origins, and brings these harms together in one integrative framework to elucidate their cumulative power. Demonstrating these harms with examples from the United States, the European Union, and Israel, I propose that biometric surveillance be addressed, evaluated and reframed as a new form of control rather than simply another means (...) of inspection. I conclude by delineating three features of biometric technologies—complexity, objectivity, and agency—that demonstrate their social power and draw attention to the importance of studying biometric surveillance. (shrink)

I provide a history of research on G×E in this article, showing that there have actually been two distinct concepts of G×E since the very origins of this research. R. A. Fisher introduced what I call the biometric concept of G×E, or G×EB, while Lancelot Hogben introduced what I call the developmental concept of G×E, or G×ED. Much of the subsequent history of research on G×E has largely consisted in the separate legacies of these separate concepts, along with the (...) (sometimes acrimonious) disputes that have arisen time and again when employers of each have argued over the appropriate way to conceptualize the phenomenon. With this history in place, I then consider more recent attempts to distinguish between different concepts of G×E, paying particular attention to the commonly made distinction between “statistical interaction” and “interactionism,” and also Michael Rutter’s distinction between “statistical interaction” and “the biological concept of interaction.” I argue that the history of the separate legacies of G×EB and G×ED better supports Rutter’s analysis of the situation, and that this analysis best paves the way for an integrative relationship between the various scientists investigating the place of G×E in the etiology of complex traits. (shrink)

The rapid spread of electronic fingerprinting not only creates new regimes of surveillance but compels users to adopt novel ways of performing their bodies to suit the new technology. This ethnography uses two Indian case studies – of a welfare office and a workplace – to unpack the processes by which biometric devices become effective tools for determining identity. While in the popular imaginary biometric technology is often associated with providing disinterested and thus objective evaluation of identity, in (...) practice ‘failures to enrol’ and ‘false rejects’ frequently cause crises of representation. People address these by tinkering with their bodies and changing the rules, and in the process craft biometric bodies. These are assembled bodies that link people and objects in ways considered advantageous for specific identity regimes. By using assemblage theory, the article proposes an alternative interpretation of new surveillance regimes as fluid practices that solidify through the agency of multiple actors who naturalize particular power/knowledge arrangements. (shrink)

In 1936, the journalist Hannah Lees published “Two Million Tightrope Walkers,” drawing attention to the significant number of people in the United States estimated to have diabetes. Focusing on how people with diabetes should live, she emphasized the importance of recording the exact values of everything they ate and avoiding all “riotous living” lest they be unable to keep careful measurements of calories, insulin, and sleep. Employing two meanings of measured – as counted and as moderate – Lees was doing (...) more than communicating how someone might control their disease; she was also calling for a “controlled and self-reliant citizenry.” Indeed, Lees insisted that diabetics who followed a regime of measurement “make a good deal better citizens than the average.” Drawing on the writings of Lees and other social commentators, I explore the link between biometrics, citizenship, and diabetes in the United States in the interwar years. In particular, I look at how this disease came to symbolize both the regimes of discipline thought to be necessary in a society moving to consumption as its economic motor, and the fears of what could happen if consumption ran amok. Biometrics, I argue, offered clinicians and patients a potent tool for measuring deviance and, potentially, for restoring a person to the “norm.”. (shrink)