Should they? Mobile Biometrics and Technopolicy Meet Queer Community Considerations

Abstract

Smartphones are integral to our daily lives and activities, providing us with basic functions like texting and phone calls to more complex motion-based functionalities like navigation, mobile gaming, and fitness-tracking. To facilitate these functionalities, smartphones rely on integrated sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. These sensors provide personalized measurements that, in turn, contribute to tasks such as analyzing biometric data for mobile health purposes. In addition to benefiting smartphone users, biometric data holds significant value for researchers engaged in biometric identification research. Nonetheless, utilizing this user data for biometric identification tasks, such as gait and gender recognition, raises serious privacy, normative, and ethical concerns, particularly within the queer community. Concerns of algorithmic bias and algorithmically-driven dysphoria surface from a historical backdrop of marginalization, surveillance, harassment, discrimination, and violence against the queer community. In this position paper, we contribute to the timely discourse on safeguarding human rights within AI-driven systems by providing a sense of challenges, tensions, and opportunities for new data protections and biometric collection practices in a way that grapples with the sociotechnical realities of the queer community. CCS CONCEPTS• Social and professional topics → Computing / technology policy; • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence;• Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; • Applied computing → Law.

How AI hype impacts the LGBTQ + community

“…This type of narrative has garnered substantial attention on social media platforms, with the top 500 influential tweets containing hateful 'grooming' allegations being viewed over 72 million times [154]. Automated gender recognition exacerbates existing biases and opens transand non-binary people up to harm [136,138] Using video gender recognition systems on online video content, researchers attempted to ascertain hormone replacement treatment in trans content creators [155,156] Online content algorithms promote the proliferation of harmful content about…”