The Transparent Body: Medical Information, Physical Privacy and Respect for Body Integrity

Abstract

Whilst work is keenly progressing on ever more ways to authenticate people and enhance security via the use of biometrics, sometimes the ethical context is overlooked. One of the areas that has hardly been considered is the potential for finding out medical information of an individual via the data that is captured to perform authentication or security checks. Throughout history, the importance of allowing individuals to keep their medical information private has been recognised, yet now, a new wave of technology is emerging which may be capable of gleaning such details without the individual even knowing that they have been captured. Thus in this chapter we consider what potential there is for personal medical information of people enrolled into second generation biometrics systems to be disclosed. We discuss various second generation biometrics and assess exactly what medical information they could detect. We then assess the likelihood of incidental medical findings actually occurring and highlight the importance of future policy recommendations addressing this topic.