Biometric Identification That Goes Beyond Fingerprints (USA Today)

From the article:

Who has the right to collect your biodata? Who gets to access it? How can it be used? And what happens in case of security failures? After all, you can change your passwords after a Heartbleed bug, but you can't change your irises.

Even agnostics agree that laws haven't kept pace with the technology. "The technology itself is ethically neutral," says Alan Gelb, a researcher at the Center for Global Development who studies national ID systems, including biometrics. "The question is how the technology is used."

But Gelb says there's not enough oversight or regulation of the technologies. Although the 160 national ID programs Gelb and his co-researcher found go a long way toward bridging the "identity gap," half of them lack adequate data-protection laws, he said.

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