When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity by Shoshana Amielle Magnet
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Overview: Biometric technologies used for the confirmation of individual human identity are a persistent example of a technological vaporware, probably more familiar to most of us from science fiction than from their slow increase in use in personal travel documents, such as passports and fingerprint locks on cars and laptops. However, particularly in the post-9/11 United States, the biometrics industry is currently expanding, landing multibillion dollar contracts in border control, adding to its existing footholds in law-enforcement, welfare and prison management. Focusing on five main themes surrounding the technology, When Biometrics Fail provides an historical overview of the growth of the industry since the 1970s. Using evidence from a range of contemporary sources, journalism, media and recent research published on biometric technologies, Magnet demonstrates rather compellingly how these technologies fail to live up to Daston and Galison’s [1,2] concept of "mechanical objectivity," the idea that machines are capable of making unbiased judgments owing to the privileged link to the physical world (and lack of subjectivity) with which they are associated by marketers, computer scientists, politicians and the media.
Genre: Non-Fiction > General
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