The Face of Biometrics

Biometric-identification technologies—technologies that use bodily attributes to identify individuals for surveillance, social control, commerce, and other purposes—are becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday life in post-9/11 society. Not surprisingly, these developments have sparked increased scholarly interest, and a number of new books about biometric technologies have appeared recently.

Two of these new books are Lisa S. Nelson’s America Identified: Biometric Technology and Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Pp. viii+258. $32) and Kelly A. Gates’s Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: NYU Press, 2011. Pp. xii+264. $24). Both draw at least somewhat on technology studies writ large, but the former is rooted in policy studies, the latter in communications. Neither really takes the kind of approach that would be taken by historians or sociologists of technology.

America Identified is the broader work, taking on biometrics in general, rather than a specific set of technologies. The book includes a thorough and well-researched account of the history of the development of biometric-identification technologies and a cogent discussion of the political philosophy underlying the notion of privacy. Its primary sources, around which the book is centered, are a set of focus-group interviews with eighty-seven participants and a national telephone survey of a thousand participants.

Nelson sought to measure these research subjects’ understandings of such concepts as privacy and liberty as they relate to biometric technology. She found that her research subjects were more nuanced about the relationship between privacy and biometric technology than much of surveillance literature would suggest. Rather than lashing themselves to the mast like Odysseus—asking the government to invade their own privacy for their own good (p. 182)—Nelson’s subjects were more inclined to consider carefully whether various privacy invasions were warranted in terms of the nature and seeming appropriateness of the privacy invasion and the perceived gain in security. Moreover, they fully recognized the “irony” (p. 120) surrounding biometric technology: namely, that the same suite of technologies is essential both for state (or corporate) surveillance and for enhanced protection of personal information.

With this data, Nelson proposes “to use societal perceptions of biometric technology to map the public policy considerations that are important and consequential to the integration of the technology into our lives.” She argues that a “starting point for technological or policy innovation is to understand the individuals who are subject to its purview.” With her data, Nelson proposes “to build a policy paradigm for the integration of biometric technology into the daily experiences of Americans” (p. 4).

Nelson sees this approach as rooted in technology studies research on users, citing scholars such as Claude Fischer, Nelly Oudshoorn, and Trevor Pinch as inspirations. But whereas these scholars sought to understand the role that users play in the construction of technological systems and artifacts, Nelson’s goal seems quite different. If I read her correctly, she proposes to construct technology policy from the preferences of users as measured by focus groups and surveys.

This is an innovative idea, but it would seem to raise a host of questions that are not directly addressed by America Identified. For example: Is the user (like the proverbial customer) “always right”? Should technology policy be constructed around user preferences, no matter what those preferences are? Are there no values in setting policy choices that would trump such preferences? What if users are misinformed or have preferences that are immoral or violate the rights of minorities? How realistic is it to think that policy would be set in this way anyway? In addition, Nelson focuses on how, but not whether, biometrics should be deployed. Indeed, at times Nelson appears to treat the deployment of biometrics as an imperative and views her task as facilitating its “societal acceptance” (p. 185).

Thus, while constructivist sociologists of technology are interested in the user construction of technologies, Nelson is interested in the user construction of policy. Kelly Gates turns Nelson’s approach on its head, emphasizing the technological construction of users. She might have Nelson...