Biometric technology has long been used for security and law enforcement purposes such as national security watch lists, passport controls, criminal fingerprint databases, and immigration processing. Now, however, the private sector increasingly uses these systems as a verification method for authentication that previously required a PIN or password. Apple’s decision to include a fingerprint scanner in the iPhone in 2013 brought new public awareness to possible non-law-enforcement applications of biometric technologies, and the company’s shift to facial recognition access in the most recent models further normalized the concept. Biometric technology continues to be adopted in many sectors, including financial services, transportation, health care, computer systems and facility access, and voting. In many cases, this technology is more efficient, less expensive, and easier to use than traditional alternatives, while also eliminating the need for passwords, which are broadly recognized as an insufficiently secure safeguard for user data. However, as with any digital system, there are privacy concerns around the collection, use, storage, sharing, and analysis of the data that are generated by these systems.
Top Six Major Privacy Enforcement Trends: A U.S. Legislation Retrospective
Enforcement activity intensifies as U.S. consumer privacy laws continue to evolve and come into effect. In 2023 and 2024 alone, there have been dozens of enforcement actions at the U.S. federal and state levels, some of which reveal or touch on significant throughlines for privacy policy issues, such as what constitutes a privacy violation or […]
Brain-Computer Interfaces: Privacy and Ethical Considerations for the Connected Mind
BCIs are computer-based systems that directly record, process, analyze, or modulate human brain activity in the form of neurodata that is then translated into an output command from human to machine. Neurodata is data generated by the nervous system, composed of the electrical activities between neurons or proxies of this activity. When neurodata is linked, or reasonably linkable, to an individual, it is personal neurodata.