Biometrics, Surveillance, and the Global Culture of Mistrust Post-Mumbai
Description
This talk will brief the audience on the increasing ubiquity of biometrics across the world as well as discuss how biometrics, particularly facial recognition technology, restricts the movement of people. As the demand for biometrics grows and as these technologies expand into sectors outside of security, it is important to reflect upon the often-unremarked transformation in trust that it signals. Traditional authentication technologies, such as tokens or passwords, place trust in cooperative users, allowing them to produce what they possess or demonstrate what they know. Biometrics, however, relies on and reproduces a culture of suspicion. Its model of sociality does not require the participation, let alone cooperation, of its participants and for this reason we should think carefully about the kind of society it imagines: is it one where mutual trust and cooperation from below have been replaced by suspicion and coercion from above?
Location
Stewart 279
Start Date
11-6-2018 3:00 PM
Biometrics, Surveillance, and the Global Culture of Mistrust Post-Mumbai
Stewart 279
This talk will brief the audience on the increasing ubiquity of biometrics across the world as well as discuss how biometrics, particularly facial recognition technology, restricts the movement of people. As the demand for biometrics grows and as these technologies expand into sectors outside of security, it is important to reflect upon the often-unremarked transformation in trust that it signals. Traditional authentication technologies, such as tokens or passwords, place trust in cooperative users, allowing them to produce what they possess or demonstrate what they know. Biometrics, however, relies on and reproduces a culture of suspicion. Its model of sociality does not require the participation, let alone cooperation, of its participants and for this reason we should think carefully about the kind of society it imagines: is it one where mutual trust and cooperation from below have been replaced by suspicion and coercion from above?
Infographic