“…the growing reliance on social media and greater usages of physically intrusive technologies have opened the door to new surveillance opportunities”
Paik, S., Mays, K. K., & Katz, J. E. (2022). Invasive yet inevitable? Privacy normalization trends in biometric technology. Social Media + Society, 8(4).
https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221129147
I chose this article because I think we are increasingly surveilling ourselves and allowing data to be collected and stored without clear safeguards. The research surveyed a representative sample of 1150 people to investigate attitudes in the US to the collection and use of biometric data by consumer technology. Questionnaires were developed to investigate three key questions surrounding the use of DNA identification and facial recognition technologies:
- How does the context that the technology is used affect a person’s comfort level with that use?
- How does who is collecting the information and how is it used or shared affect someone’s attitude to the use and sharing of gathered information?
- How do concerns about privacy and information security affect how these technologies are viewed?
The context of information gathering influences people’s comfort, facial recognition in airports and to prevent shoplifting was generally accepted, where location tracking of mobile phones was only acceptable to 25% of people. People were willing to share DNA information when it had perceived benefit to themselves, but 60% were not comfortable with anonymised data being sold to pharmaceutical companies. In a scenario where facial recognition data was used to create profiles, and interpreted to ascertain the age, sex or sexual orientation of the person observed only 21% were comfortable. In general, people with the strongest privacy concerns were those least comfortable with intrusive technology. Similarly, the more concerned people were with information misuse the less comfortable they were with data collection. These findings were generally independent of age, sex, and education.
There is a strong implication that if we understood how our data was packaged and used after it was collected we would be much less comfortable with these technologies. However this study concludes that the collection and use of biometric data in personal apps normalises people’s perception of the intrusiveness of these technologies, and the metadata collected has become highly saleable and of interest to law enforcement. Both uses are beyond that intended by the user.
While this study looks at biometric technology within consumer products, we are increasingly using fingerprint and facial recognition technologies with our devices for security and access. Additionally, health devices such as Fitbits gather detailed biometric information. With Google advertising that it will notify you of when to expect your period, they can also be seen as collecting increasingly personal and invasive information. Our use of social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, and Facebook provides images that are scraped to be used to train facial recognition algorithms without us being asked as reported by the New York Times in 2020.
This research presents the conundrum with which we are faced and invites further research into how we can balance privacy concerns with our use of technology that harvests biometric data. And In light of the recent Australian hacks at Optus and Medibank, it would be very interesting to see how the results may differ if this survey was repeated here.