Biometrics Applications:Ethics And Governance

Biometric identification technologies refer to a class of automatic identification or authentication technologies based on individual unique physiological or behavioral characteristics,including fingerprint identification,face recognition,iris recognition and other technologies.Compared with the traditional identification methods(such as user name and password),biometric identification has many advantages:it is not easy to be stolen,lost or forgotten,more secure and convenient.Especially in recent years,coupled with telecommunications fraud,disclosure and sale of personal information,traditional identification methods have been unable to meet people's needs on the identity authentication security level,and at the same time,the progress of computer technology which leads to reduction of the cost and improvement of the performance,have made the intelligent biometric technologies more practical.At present,the technologies are widely used in visa,surveillance,ID card,workplace attendance,transaction payment,access control and other fields.However,biometrics has gained extensive social applications and has benefited society,commercial and hundred million people,as well as raised many ethical issues.This paper mainly studies and discusses the four aspects of ethical issues involved in biometric identification,including privacy protection,the informatization of the body,autonomy and social exclusion.Among them,in the privacy protection section,based on the discussion of the concept of privacy,the new features of privacy in the biometric situation are identified,and the two views of privacy protection are responded,and finally this section analyzes the challenges which privacy protection is faced with;in the section of informatization of the body,the concept,causes and particularity of informatization of the body are analyzed,and it is pointed out that informatization of the body plays an active role in medicine,but it may also bring risks such as discrimination and stigma;on the basis of discussing the development and meaning of informed consent,the autonomy section points out that the classic informed consent pattern in the biometric situation is inadequate,and that it is necessary to pay attention to the situation of the minors or those who are unable to give consent,and finally,the informed consent for collecting and using biometrics information for security purposes and informed consent under the condition of function creep are discussed;in the section of social exclusion,it analyzes causes of social exclusion,the severity of the risk and vulnerable population,and based on this,two views of social exclusion are responded,and finally the strategies and challenges to deal with social exclusion are discussed.Finally,according to the negative influence raised by these ethical issues,some recommendations on governance are proposed.Governance can be carried out from the following three dimensions:ethical governance,public policy governance and rule governance.Among them,ethical governance focuses on ethical framework which can be used to evaluate actions taken in biometric identification technologies,namely the ethical principles,which is the basis for formulating policies and laws;public policy governance analysis the main problems of the research,development and application of biometric technologies in China,and points out that we should introduce some relevant policies;rule governance firstly introduces related laws and regulations in foreign countries,and based on the relevant laws and regulations of our country,the recommendations on the statuary governance of biometrics are proposed finally.