America Identified: Biometric Technology and Society.

• Author: Harper, Jim
• Position: Book review

America Identified: Biometric Technology and Society

Lisa S. Nelson

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010, 266 pp.

Lisa Nelson's America Identified: Biometric Technology and Society is a slow and careful examination of a formidably broad landscape---at least until she springs to her conclusions. Among them: "Individual liberty must be reconceptualized to account for the use of data by individuals for communication, transactions, and networking." It's a scholar's way of saying, "Move over, sovereign individual. Experts are going to handle this."

Nothing about biometrics commands this outcome. Given her ideological choices, Nelson could reach the same result with reference to any modern technology--and many consumer products and services. Indeed, for its titular emphasis on biometrics, the book is very light on the technologies that permit machines to identify humans with improving accuracy.

Nobody could capture all the issues arising from the interplay between biometrics and "society." The book progresses earnestly from chapter to broad-themed chapter, examining security, privacy, anonymity, trust, and paternalism in loose relation to biometrics. Evidence from public opinion research occasionally punctuates the vast expense between an important emerging technology and the philosophical questions Nelson seems to prefer.

The book has insight, or at least a new way of expressing an important insight: Nelson regularly refers to the "currency of personal information," suggesting that personal information is a modern medium of exchange. But calling it "currency" suggests to the liberty-minded reader that personal information is something individuals should have the power to control. Don't be too sure.

Privacy is a central value in debates about machine-readable biometrics (and all other digital technologies). Nelson dabbles with treating privacy as a property-like interest, but finds that this view too often places privacy in opposition to "the attainment of a benefit or a common good." So she casts her lot with another approach, treating privacy as "a dimension of social freedom" that "must be a factor in contemplation of policy." Nelson is channeling Amitai Etzioni, who helpfully demonstrated through his book The Limits of Privacy that pulling privacy from its grounding in individual rights hands it over to those who will often subordinate it to "the common good."

Nelson seizes on exceptions in John Stuart Mill's articulation of individual rights...