What are the proposed uses of biometrics in health care and the ethics and politics of body data in the digital age? As security and surveillance become the order of the day, biometric technologies have become a ubiquitous and naturalized part of most aspects of everyday life. Operating from the premise that “bodies don’t lie,” biometrics promises increased safety, security, accuracy, and reliability in identity recognition and verification. These promises are especially appealing in the health care industry where the verification of patient and provider identities is a necessary security feature for protecting patient data. Despite their promises, however, the fact that biometrics facilitates the coding, analysis, and judgment of embodied information in new, more complex, and more far-reaching ways than were previously possible in health care opens up a host of ethical and political issues for patients, providers, and populations. Long-standing virtues in medicine such as privacy, confidentiality, justice and beneficence are challenged as numerous and often unknown institutions and individuals beyond the clinic can and will have access to this embodied information for security, surveillance, and marketing purposes.

Rebecca J. Hester is assistant professor of social medicine in the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics with an emphasis in Latin American and Latino Studies from UCSC. Her research focuses on the politics of the body as they are manifested at and through the intersections of immigration, health, and security.  She is co-author, with Ronnie Lipschutz, of “We are the Borg!  Human Assimilation into Cellular Society,” pp. 366-407, in: M.G. Michael and Katina Michael (eds.), Uberveillance and the Social Implications of Microchip Implants: Emerging Technologies (Hershey, Penna.: IGI Global, 2014).