Abstract
Whilst work is keenly progressing on ever more ways to authenticate people and enhance security via the use of biometrics, sometimes the ethical context is overlooked. One of the areas that has hardly been considered is the potential for finding out medical information of an individual via the data that is captured to perform authentication or security checks. Throughout history, the importance of allowing individuals to keep their medical information private has been recognised, yet now, a new wave of technology is emerging which may be capable of gleaning such details without the individual even knowing that they have been captured. Thus in this chapter we consider what potential there is for personal medical information of people enrolled into second generation biometrics systems to be disclosed. We discuss various second generation biometrics and assess exactly what medical information they could detect. We then assess the likelihood of incidental medical findings actually occurring and highlight the importance of future policy recommendations addressing this topic.
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Notes
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E.g. some eye diseases could prevent iris scanning, arthritis could prevent hand geometry, finger burns can prevent fingerprinting, etc.
- 2.
E.g. facial geometry taken in different periods of time can reveal some endocrinopathies. Also, a bitonal voice is a result of a paralysed recurrent laryngeal nerve – this can be a side effect of lung cancer.
- 3.
E.g. certain chromosomal disorders – such as Down’s syndrome, Turner’s syndrome, and Klinefelter’s syndrome – are known to be associated with characteristic fingerprint patterns. In another example, Wong, M., Choo, S.P. & Tan, E.H. (2008) reported that several cancer patients on the drug Capecitabine have reported loss of fingerprint as a side-effect of taking the medication (Wong et al. 2008).
- 4.
Infrared cameras can easily, and covertly, detect dental reconstruction and plastic surgery (e.g. added or subtracted skin tissue, added internal materials, body implants, scar removal, skin resurfaced by laser, removed tattoos, etc.) because the temperature distribution across reconstructed and artificial tissues is different from normal.
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- 6.
Other kind of evoked potential are Somatosensory Evoked Potentials (SSEPs) and Motor Evoked Potentials (MEP), which are not relevant to biometrics.
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The scanners bounce harmless “millimeter waves” off passengers who are selected to stand inside a portal with arms raised after clearing the metal detector. A screener in a nearby room views the black-and-white image and looks for objects on a screen that are shaded differently from the body. Finding a suspicious object, a screener radios a colleague at the checkpoint to search the passenger. Privacy is partly protected by blurring passengers’ faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person’s gender.
- 8.
A Mendelian population is an interbreeding group of organisms that share a common gene pool. As defined by Michael Allaby; “Mendelian population.” A Dictionary of Zoology. 1999. Encyclopedia.com. 2 Feb. 2010 http://www.encyclopedia.com
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Mordini, E., Ashton, H. (2012). The Transparent Body: Medical Information, Physical Privacy and Respect for Body Integrity. In: Mordini, E., Tzovaras, D. (eds) Second Generation Biometrics: The Ethical, Legal and Social Context. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3892-8_12
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