Data Protection and the use of Biometric Data in the EU

Abstract

Abstract. This article is concerned with the legal approach to the regulation of biometrics in European policy making. It is observed that the latter is based mainly on a data protection perspective. From this data protection point of view, the handling of biometric data in the EU would benefit from a more stringent application of the purpose binding principle. Further, it is demonstrated that more thorough impact assessments could become the cornerstone for legal assessments of the application of data protection principles in individual biometric projects such as EURODAC. The conclusion is that the current approach to informational trends and biometrics will have to develop beyond personal data protection towards a more comprehensive notion of societal data protection through privacy enhancing data and identity management. Within this wider framework, data protection should be able to deal with the use of biometrics and multiple layers and concepts of privacy created by the information society as it is developing.

Civilizing Surveillance Practices: The Pullman Police Department Public Safety Camera Monitoring Internship Program

“…Exploring function creep from a philosophical perspective, Brey (2004) introduces questions of technological morality within the potential (and actuality) of biometric identification-namely facial recognition. Sprokkereef and De Hert (2007) when discussing the ethical considerations of biometric identifiers within surveillance programs offer the observation that the centralization of these data reaffirms the state's power as a monopolist entity (p. 193). Most frequently referenced in recommending strategies for minimizing social risk and misuse are the development of techniques to place controls, limits, and restrictions on the use of the data and the deployment of the technology (p. 193).…”

A comparison of primary stakeholders’ views on the deployment of biometric technologies in border management: Case study of SMart mobILity at the European land borders

“…Although the use of biometric technologies has the potential to improve the border crossing process, it still raises some ethical, legal and social implications that need to be considered [4,5,13,17,[23][24][25]29]. Biometric technologies have been shown to generate more information than required for a specific purpose, and there is the danger that such additional information may be exploited for unintended or unauthorized purposes [18].…”

“…Despite the potential benefits of using biometric technologies in border control, inappropriate use of such a technology may corrode public trust due to ethical, privacy and data protection challenges [2,4,13,17,23,24,29]. Biometric technologies tend to generate more information than is needed for a specific purpose, and create the danger of using this additional information for other purposes for which it has not been intended or authorized [18].…”

Biometric Recognition in Automated Border Control

“…However, although most aspects can be accurately evaluated in ABC systems, the accuracy evaluation faces some challenges because too few impostor attempts are present [MacLeod and McLindin 2011] and collected biometric data are not readily made public for privacy reasons. In fact, the legislation of some countries does not allow the public dissemination of biometric data (particularly regarding the fingerprint and iris traits), match scores, and decision thresholds obtained and used by the biometric systems installed for government activities [Sprokkereef 2008;Iglezakis 2013]. Therefore, it is not possible to compute the typical figures of merit used in the accuracy evaluation of biometric systems, such as the FAR, FRR, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) [Gamassi et al 2005a;Mansfield and Wayman 2002], and the evaluation of the accuracy primarily relies on figures of merit computed using technology evaluations performed on public datasets or using internal testing procedures [MacLeod and McLindin 2011].…”