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- Convenors:
-
Michelle Spektor
(MIT College of Computing)
Ranjit Singh (Data Society Research Institute)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Biometrics create a correspondence between people and data by encoding their bodies and expressions into discrete measurements. This panel unpacks the social and political stakes of biometric measurements, and their calculative logics, across technological, geographic, and temporal contexts.
Long Abstract:
Biometrics create a correspondence between a person and a dataset by encoding human bodies and expressions into discrete measurements. Governments, private sector companies, forensic scientists, and even smartphone apps use representations of the measured person as a stand-in for their likeness, and to certify that they are who they say they are. However, these same measurements have also been used to draw conclusions about a person’s social characteristics, physical attributes, and emotional states — efforts that defined biometrics’ origins in eugenics, global policing, and colonial expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, digital and automated biometric systems are underwritten by body measurements that are similarly encoded with classifications related to criminality, race, class, gender, age, and disability. These calculative logics of biometric measurement are imbricated into past and present biometric technologies, the data they produce, and the forms of identification and surveillance that they enable. They also profoundly shape individual and collective encounters with borders, access to services, citizenship, and discrimination.
This open panel invites submissions that unpack biomerics’ calculative logics, and explore how they mutually shape the design of technological systems; state, institutional, and corporate power; and the lived experiences of people subjected to biometric measurement. Taking an expansive view of what counts as biometrics, this panel welcomes papers on techniques ranging from anthropometry to multi-modal generative AI, and their deployment across geographic contexts in the past and present. Together, panelists will critically examine the social and political stakes of measuring the human body and expression.
Key words: biometrics; identification; calculation; quantification; measurement; the body
Accepted papers:
Session 1Keren Weitzberg (Queen Mary University of London)
Short abstract:
Central to the “calculative logics” of today’s digital identity sector is the promise of inclusivity, the goal of capturing the population as a whole & providing a “legal identity to all." This paper examines Kenya’s Huduma Namba biometric ID system & its aspirations for informational completeness.
Long abstract:
Central to the “calculative logics” of today’s digital identity sector is the promise of inclusivity, the goal of capturing the population as a whole and providing a “legal identity to all” (SDG 16.9). Yet, as multiple studies have shown, digital identity systems are frequently built atop colonial and postcolonial identification practices and legacy systems, which were never designed to include all members of the body politic. This paper examines the question of who “counts” and is “counted” by critically interrogating the struggles and controversies that attended Kenya’s recent and short-lived digital ID system known as Huduma Namba (or “Service Number’” in Swahili). Ambitiously aimed at biometrically capturing the entire population, the Huduma Namba project (and its successor Maisha Namba) sought to assign unique identity numbers and smart cards to every resident of Kenya. Stretching concepts from computing and STS infrastructure literature, this paper shows how Huduma Namba remained tethered to longstanding, exclusionary forms of documentary and biometric citizenship and a fraught “politics of numbers.” The prospect of complete, informational accuracy—embodied in the idea of a "single source of truth”—nevertheless became a terrain of struggle and shared language for both government officials and civil society groups.
Zehra Hashmi (University of Pennsylvania)
Short abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork at an identity registration center to examine how biometrics authenticate both the individual body and kin relations in Pakistan’s identity database. It will follow how the limits of biometrics, not just their affordances, shape digital identification.
Long abstract:
The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) oversees Pakistan’s biometric-based national identity database, one of the largest of its kind in the world. The database records Pakistani citizens' biometric data and personal biographical information such as name, age and address, while also linking citizens to their next of kin. Mapping kinship networks fulfills a central identification function for the database: NADRA identifies individuals through their relations with others.
This paper will examine the role of biometric data in mediating kin relations, particularly for evidencing relatedness at the NADRA Identity Registration Center. It will focus on how family member’s biometric prints are used to authenticate the identity of their relations during the identity registration process. According to NADRA protocols, if a next of kin is already registered in the database, they can accompany a new citizen-applicant to their registration center and “vouch” for their relation through a form of biometric attestation. In this paper, I will explore how biometrics accompany and occasionally supplant conventional modes of bureaucratic attestation through emergent practices of identification.
Simultaneously, I attend to how NADRA’s mode of instrumentalizing kin relatedness can allow us to consider the limits of biometric technology. The use of kinship reveals how biometrics, and by extension the individual body, only partially fulfill NADRA’s surveillance logic. Through an ethnographic focus on bureaucratic practices at NADRA’s Identity Registration Center in Islamabad, I will follow how the limitations of biometrics, as opposed to their affordances alone, inform the digital infrastructures they are embedded within.
Azadeh Akbari (University of Twente)
Short abstract:
The paper conceptualises code/body to highlight the dyadic relationship between the material body and its datafication. Based on autoethnographic material (Akbari 2024), this paper offers a perspective into entrapment in datafied bodies, where even a beating heart can betray the person at borders.
Long abstract:
The European Union has gradually intensified its gathering of biometric data of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, and increasingly makes the resulting data banks available for several immigration-related and Police institutions. Where legal, political, and humanitarian efforts fail, asylum seekers, try to distort their bodies as the source of undesirable biometric data. With methods such as burning fingertips or claiming to be an unaccompanied minor, they attempt to escape the algorithm and defy the problematic Dublin Convention. Consequently, the EU uses technologies such as retinal scans or DNA tests to overcome such attempts. This paper scrutinises border control’s intensification through bodily practices and the dynamism of bodily resistance against such measures. The research addresses the historical interrelations between surveillance, identification, belonging, and citizenship (Lyon 2010) and highlights the data-based exclusion of unwelcome asylum seekers by forcing their bodies to reveal their deception. The paper conceptualises code/body to transcend the idea of data double (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) or digital shadow. The code/body (Akbari, 2024) highlights the dyadic relationship between the material body and its datafication. Consequently, the body is not only travelling through borders; it becomes the border. The extreme datafication of bodies, borders, and immigration force the body to become omnipresent, whereas the countersurveillance attempts by refugees and asylum seekers coerce the material body to disappear. Based on autoethnographic material (Akbari 2024), this paper offers a perspective into entrapment in datafied bodies, where every gesture, drop of sweat, and even a beating heart can betray the person at borders.
Michelle Spektor (MIT College of Computing)
Short abstract:
The Basel System is an Israeli biometric system that surveils Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who work in Israel. This talk traces Basel’s history from its origins in the Oslo Accords to its implementation as a technology of occupation, and examines its legacy in Palestine/Israel today.
Long abstract:
While the Oslo Accords’ negotiations unfolded throughout the 1990s, tens of thousands of Palestinians traveled daily from the Occupied Territories to work in Israel. In the negotiations, Israel agreed to maintain their future employment and enable their mobility between the Accords’ anticipated neighboring Israeli and Palestinian states. The solution for this, designated in one of the Oslo process’ protocols, was a biometric permit and border crossing infrastructure. Later named the “Basel System,” this infrastructure’s development was already underway when negotiations collapsed and the Second Intifada began in the early 2000s. After that, Basel transformed into a technology of Israeli military occupation as it became integral to checkpoints and permit systems in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
In the absence of available archives, this paper traces Basel’s history and current implementations through oral history interviews with engineers who designed the system, reports on checkpoints documented by the human rights organization MachsomWatch and interviews with its members, ethnographic observation at six West Bank checkpoints, and interviews with Palestinian workers who are surveilled by the Basel System. By bringing together STS and related scholarship on surveillance in Palestine/Israel, I show that biometrics operated as a tool of separation that underwrote both Oslo’s two-state ambitions, and Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian Territories. Basel also exemplifies how early-2000s Israeli security politics increasingly intertwined with technological surveillance of Palestinian mobility. The presentation concludes by discussing Basel’s consequences for life under occupation, its influence on subsequent Israeli biometric systems, and its broader legacy in surveillance in Palestine/Israel today.
Torsten Voigt (RWTH Aachen University)
Short abstract:
The paper analyzes the values, norms, and bodies of knowledge that are mobilized in decision making and the governance of biometric innovation in migration management and migration control.
Long abstract:
The so-called “migration crisis” has become a key issue in public discourse in countries around the world. Attempts to control migration and resolve this “crisis” have increasingly relied on innovation in biometric technologies. Biometrics is the measurement and analysis of personal physical and behavioral features, such as the face or biological age.
Biometric technologies disguise the human bias inherent to the development and deployment of technologies. They are nonetheless applied to vulnerable populations, including migrants such as refugees and asylum-seekers. They are routinely produced and deployed by policy makers, border control, developers, and other (potential) users to categorize migrants, generate suspicion, and address a collectively felt, “diagnosed” deficit regarding migration control.
This paper critically examines the decision-making relating to socio-technological innovation and use of biometrics in migration management. It highlights how specific social contexts and political cultures frame the goals, risks, and benefits of biometric technological innovation in migration. I use the concept of “ethical regimes” (Radin and Kowal 2015) as an analytical lens to better understand how decisions on biometric innovations in migrations contexts are made. The argument draws on extensive interviews with various stakeholders, ethnographic research, and document analyses. The paper sheds light on the values, norms, and bodies of knowledge that are mobilized in decision making and the governance of biometric innovation.
Ranjit Singh (Data Society Research Institute)
Short abstract:
Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork, my paper describes the work of intermediaries around government offices, who (in)visibly support citizens in navigating the bureaucratic procedures of enrolling into Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identity number.
Long abstract:
Investments in the digital welfare state are often driven by the promise of removing intermediaries between the state and citizens, yet they continue to play a key role in the last mile delivery of state services. By intermediaries, I mean people who interface between bureaucrats and citizens. Their work often as proxies for citizens is to not only simplify bureaucratic procedures for them, but also help insulate them from bureaucratic apathy. Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe the work of intermediaries around government offices, who (in)visibly support citizens in navigating the bureaucratic procedures of enrolling into Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identity number. Building on Julia Elyachar’s concept of ‘phatic labor,’ I position such intermediaries themselves as infrastructure and illustrate how their affective networks can be leveraged to orchestrate a form of distributive justice to ensure that being marginal does not preclude a citizen’s access to welfare services.
Carolina Polito (LUISS Guido Carli University)
Short abstract:
Through fieldwork in Cape Town, the paper investigates the politics of biometric technologies. Looking at standards as key sites of political struggle, findings underscore the difficulties over standards conflation reflecting the opportunistic but peripheral role of foreign contractors.
Long abstract:
This paper looks at how power dynamics unfold when biometric technologies are produced and sold to African countries. Africa has long emerged as a site for the development and widespread implementation of biometric technologies. South Africa paved the way under Francis Galton’s rule as the centre of eugenics experimentation and colonial control through biometric technologies. When it comes to border control and digital ID, the South African biometric market is nonetheless monopolized by French contractors. In terms of technology supply, scholars suggest that present methods of technology transfer result in imbalanced power dynamics perpetuating forms of colonial ties. However, STS has revealed that the act of transferring technology is more intricate than is widely perceived. It is only by looking at how the artefact is designed and crafted and how this craftmanship reflects power distributions that a deeper understanding of the dynamic in place can be grasped. How are power relations embedded in the making of biometric technology? Standards formulation is at the core of the process of the embodiment of power relations into the making of digital artefacts.
Drawing on primary sources gathered during fieldwork in Cape Town, this paper looks at the politics behind the adoption of the new biometric e-gates at Cape Town International Airport, and at the process lying between the international standard creation and the local implementation of the technology. Preliminary findings suggest that there are difficulties over the conflation of technical standards which reflects an opportunistic but peripheral role of foreign contractors.
Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn (University of Pennsylvania)
Short abstract:
I show how state and corporate actors collaborated to scrape personal data, drawn from Florida public records, to create rudimentary digital profiles in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the processes developed in Florida are employed by police and militaries to surveil racialized people around the world.
Long abstract:
In the 1980s, the state of Florida began an initiative to combine disparate data points -phone and criminal records with driver licenses and home addresses – into a single supercomputer. The datasets, owned by Database Technologies, created digital representations of individuals across the state. The company achieved this in three ways. First, to amass unique data sets, it made use of Florida’s Sunshine Law, which made government meetings, arrests, and records public knowledge. Second, it circumvented privacy concerns by allowing police forces to purchase the data from corporate actors. Third, the company utilized its contacts with the CIA and DEA to combine additional information and expand its data pool to the Caribbean. This paper revisits two flashpoints in the history of data fusion centers in Florida by first returning to early 1990s debates over the legality of biometric identification in law enforcement. Then, the paper discusses how, in the lead up to the contested 2000 Presidential Election, Florida tasked Database Technologies with purging voters in the months before the election. Throughout the Global War on Terror, US military and police forces utilized the company’s algorithms to profile racial minorities in the United States and deployed their technologies across the Global South. Today, Database Technologies’ base algorithm is used around the world, from biometric identifications for bank statements and credit bureaus to consumer data brokers and military contractors. The case of Database Technologies demonstrates the extent to which Florida serves as a data laboratory for surveillance mechanisms that shape our lives.
Anna Bredstrom (Linköping University)
Short abstract:
The legally sanctioned processing of biometric data in the EU's migration and border control databases has increased rapidly over the last decade. This paper seeks to analyze the inherent logics, anticipated risks and discursive shifts in experts' views on interoperability and shared personal data.
Long abstract:
Legally sanctioned management of sensitive personal and biometric data in large scale migration and border control EU-databases has rapidly increased in the past decade. The databases include EURODAC, VIS and SIS-II but more are planned, including EES, ETIAS and ECRIS-TCN. Currently, EU-Lisa with its advisory groups of member state representatives, is engaged in technological and organizational developments aiming for easier access to data. Interoperability between the databases, including Europol and Interpol data sources, is in this context framed as the key to effective detection, identification, and prevention of crime and security threats. However, this development where functionalities over time evolve and expand aligns also with a general societal ‘securitization’ and criminalization of migration more specifically. It is also conducive to the normalization of risks, such as those of built-in ’function creeps’, which researchers had articulated long prior to the current developments.
We have previously argued for further exploration of ethical and biopolitical consequences of this development (Bredström, Krifors and Mešić 2022). In this paper, we do so by identifying inherent logics and anticipated risks as articulated in expert discourses concerning the contemporary Swedish technological developments; the expanded use of biometrics; and the organisational implementation of interoperability. The analysis is based on perspectives provided in interviews with migration and law enforcement authorities, data protection experts, lawyers, and NGOs, and on studies of two investigations initiated by the Swedish Government, focusing Biometrics in law enforcement (SOU 2023:32) and Interoperability between EU Information systems in the fields of police and judicial cooperation, asylum and migration, borders and visa (Ds 2022:21). In the analysis, we identify two main points that add to the familiar perspectives on the securitisation and criminalisation of migration: 1) a shift in focus from situation and context to individual identity, and 2) a shift in temporality from a valid suspicion of risk to an alarm system.
Charles Raab (University of Edinburgh)
Short abstract:
The use of biometric technologies in law enforcement reconfigures complex relationships between biometrics, policing and the general public. With reference to the UK, this paper explores legal, ethical and other considerations that shape the guardrails for these controversial uses of biometrics.
Long abstract:
There is a rapidly increasing use of biometric technologies in law enforcement for crime prevention, detection, prosecution, maintaining public order, and providing public safety. The biometric technologies that are being developed, procured and implemented involve collecting, analysing, organising and sharing fingerprints, voice and gait patterns, facial images, iris scans and other physical and behavioural characteristics, and applications of AI are envisaged. With variable evidence-based reliability and efficacy, these tools are used within and across the domain of policing and other public functions (e.g., border control) and private activities (e.g., monitoring ‘public’ space), and at local, national and international levels. Politicians and the public often welcome such developments, with the aim of keeping society ‘safe’. These systems are also the basis of lucrative technological innovation and service industries, placing procurement practices in the spotlight.
Controversies surround the new biometric reconfiguration of law enforcement, the surveillance it involves, and its impact on the public. Possibilities for regulation are framed in legal and ethical terms, featuring statutory enactment, codes of practice, high-level ethical and human-rights principles and derived practical requirements (e.g., police training), and accountability and transparency regimes. Public trust and the trustworthiness of the application of the technologies are implicated. This paper overviews some of these complex issues and relationships between biometrics, policing, societal implications, and regulation. It focuses upon UK developments and draws upon governmental, parliamentary, advisory body and academic sources that bear upon and cast light on these developments and the issues to which they give rise.
Katelyn Cioffi (NYU Law School)
Short abstract:
Biometrics have been introduced in many social welfare programs, which often employ different forms of means testing to target benefits to those who are most in need. This paper will explore the relationship between these biometric calculations and the evolution of means testing in public services.
Long abstract:
Through both national digital ID systems and more targeted use cases, biometric technologies are increasingly used in social welfare programs, including social cash transfers and healthcare. These programs are often not universal, but instead are means tested to target those who meet certain eligibility criteria. The inclusion of biometric modalities into such programs has been accompanied by the increasing automation of social welfare eligibility determinations and delivery. Both biometrics and means testing employ certain calculative logics, reducing complex aspects of individual identity into more legible characteristics that can be used to make decisions. They also share a reliance on probabilistic determinations to inform questions of access.
This paper will examine examples where biometrics have been used as a complement to means tested social welfare programs, to understand how the introduction of these technologies can either contradict or reinforce one another. It will assess what the combination of these two approaches can tell us about our current approaches to addressing poverty and social exclusion, and what legal safeguards are available in the context of economic and social rights to address potential harms.
Dimitra Kotouza (University of Edinburgh)
Short abstract:
This paper examines how narrowing conceptions of attention and distraction have emerged from neurotechnologies that measure and train attention in education contexts. These conceptions are relevant to neuroscientifically informed indices economic productivity, ‘brain capital’.
Long abstract:
Neurotechnology innovations in mobile neuromonitoring and brain-computer interfaces are changing how human brains and behaviours are understood and acted upon, while also catalysing ambitions to condition brains for learning and productivity. This paper examines neurotechnologies that capture, monitor, measure and train attention aimed for use in education contexts, some of which promise to improve learning outcomes and to address ADHD symptoms. I explore what conceptions of attention and distraction have emerged from research using such technologies, along with understandings of the learning brain. I show how such understandings are narrowed and normativised in the process of their becoming variables to be measured and visualised via neuroimaging headsets, and controlled via training and nudging students’ attention towards intended targets. These conceptions are relevant to providing measurements for neuroscientifically informed indices economic productivity, ‘brain capital’ (OECD, 2021; Smith et al, 2021). This paper forms part of the Leverhulme Trust funded project 'Biology, Data Science and the Making of Precision Education’ (PI: Ben Williamson; CoIs: Jessica Pykett and Martyn Pickersgill).
Shu Wan
Short abstract:
This paper intends to explore how an amateur anthropologist, Vivian B. Appleton, invoked anthropometric standards and methodology in racializing Chinese population at home and abroad in the early 20th century.
Long abstract:
This paper intends to explore how an amateur anthropologist, Vivian B. Appleton, invoked anthropometric standards and methodology in racializing Chinese population at home and abroad in the early 20th century.
As an American medical missionary, Vivian B. Appleton’s transnational research agenda of the distribution of Chinese and Chinese American children’s anthropometric data in the Guangdong province of China and Hawaii. I have only done preliminary research on limited published materials pertaining to Appleton’s anthropometric fieldwork in the two countries. Hence, I could only propose a brief and tentative organization of paper. I plan to review Appleton’s assistance with the influential American medical missionary William W. Cadbury in conducting an anthropometric survey on local students in the 1910s and 1920s in Guangzhou. Moreover, I intend to demonstrate her independent efforts in collecting anthropometric data on Chinese American children in Hawaii when she finished her service in China and joined the faculty of the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in the late 1920s. In her fieldwork, Appleton observed the higher anthropometric data of the young Chinese Hawaiian than their counterparts residing in China. Finally, the paper explores Appleton’s comparison of the data gathered in two countries, which led her to the conclusion that environmental factors, especially the difference in nutritional variables, mainly caused the racial differences between the Chinese and Caucasians in the distribution of anthropometric data.
Shannon Brick (Georgetown) Alicia Patterson (Oregon State University)
Short abstract:
We explore the ethical challenges posed by facial recognition systems to track and measure student attention in classrooms. We should resist such tools as they stand to increase inequality, corporatization, and risk undermining the central goals of education.
Long abstract:
This paper undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of the epistemological and ethical challenges posed by computer vision technologies which use facial recognition to track student attention in classrooms. We argue that its use is not morally justified — educators should resist the adoption of such tools, and researchers should cease developing them. We center our analysis around two central questions. First, “Can we reasonably hope that this kind of technology will be able to augment or improve teachers’ capacity to serve their students?” Second, supposing that the answer to this question is “yes” (something we argue there are strong reasons to doubt): “Do the potential educational benefits of this technology outweigh the broader ethical costs associated with institutionalizing this kind of student surveillance?” The answer to this question is a resounding “no.” In a climate in which public distrust of teachers is growing, and increasing numbers of teachers are choosing to leave the profession, the argument of this paper is thus part of a broader effort to mobilize resistance against the development of tools that would not just increase surveillance of students, but entrench reliance on corporate partnerships in education, and increase inequality in our society more broadly.