A biometric step too far?

• Juliet Lodge
• Centre for European Policy Studies

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16 August 2010Biometrics are a feature of communication technologies (ICTs). Their disproportionate use and the lax and arbitrary way in which they are defined and implemented endangers values, norms and practices central to accepted conceptions in the EU27 of transparency, data protection and data privacy. Concern over the indiscriminate and growing use of biometrics for increasingly mundane and imprecise purposes results in a breach of the earlier intention to ensure their proportionate deployment based on the principle of necessity. Deviation from this is now justified by reference to loose arguments about the alleged ‘certainty’ that biometric identifiers bring to cutting risk, and so enhancing ‘security’, however that is defined.