The effects of biometrics on the understanding of who we are

Starting from the German idealism perspective of subjectivity formation, and advancing to the post-Hegelian tradition, in this paper I defend the necessity of praising our bodies as the primary source defining who we are. That means that any technology dealing directly with the materiality of our bodies should be looked at with attention, and the leading technology doing so is biometrics, for instance when we use face recognition to unlock our cellphones or a fingerprint reader to access our computers.

Karen Spisso

I am a philosopher-to-be living and studying in Vienna. I started my career in Brazil studying German Philosophy and pedagogy applied to Philosophy. My main academic interests are the early writings of Karl Marx, Critical Theory, and History and Methodology of Economics.

The effects of biometrics on the understanding of who we are

When my finger presses the biometric reader, and my body is encoded, the device reduces a part of me to a set of skin ridges and valleys, 1’s and 0’s in the system. Biometrics is usually treated as the measurement of features from the human body, but as the name says - bio -, it can be the measurement of characteristics from any living creature. Currently, biometrics is most commonly used as an identification tool. A fingerprint is metrically apprehended by a computer, that is, the distance between the fine ridges is measured by a fingerprint reader, this becomes data that will be identified with the corresponding individual that has that finger. Once that individual needs to have their identity recognized, for example, to open a door or unlock a phone, he or she must press their finger against the biometric reader and the computer will confirm if the individual connected to that fingerprint is the person allowed to open the door or unlock the phone.

Figure 1: Fingerprint reader behind a cellphone.

Some authors from the philosophical school of German Idealism and from post-Hegelian tradition claim that we recognize who we are by the limits of what we are not (Lukács, 1975). We know the limits of our body precisely when we look at the mouse we use to scroll down this article and it resists the power of our mind, subjugating us to move our hands to its encounter and to recognize our bounded being. We are confronted with our own limits. The mouse does not give us anything back, except the knowledge of our boundaries. I am not the mouse and the mouse is not me. That's a valuable, decisive experience. It is this movement of expanding who we are and having it negated by external limits that constitutes, for some philosophers, subjectivity. And subjectivity, for most philosophers, revolves around some broad idea of consciousness. Being a subject is more than being an individual, it means one has knowledge of her freedom, is autonomous, and possesses a unitary consciousness and interiority, the latter meaning, in very broad terms, that we are constituted by something more than what the eyes can see.

Still, when my body is scanned – my iris, thumb, or face -, the device does not negate my material boundaries but echoes them. It extends who I am as its own property. “Because you are more than yourself, and I contain you as well, our relationship is settled.”, the device tells me. But what is this “me” that is being echoed back from the device?

During the development of technology in the twentieth century, philosophy already shifted its understanding of the boundaries of subjectivity. The subject is no longer external to the objects he employs. The individual and his surroundings are in symbiosis. For example, the man becomes in the eighteenth century part of the fabric he works in, he and the machine share the same clock, the same pace. But does that mean that subjectivity and objectivity finally dilute their oppositions?

Donna Haraway defended in her polemic and groundbreaking “A cyborg manifesto” that our current relationship with technology overcomes the western paradigm of the original unit between human and nature (1991). We no longer ought to undo the estranged relation with the outside world, returning to an original state of harmony in which humans are entirely recognized as part of nature. Modern technology allows us to go beyond this. There is no original unit to be reached again, no internal boundaries to destroy and new surrounding borders to rebuild, no parts to be made whole once more. There is only fluidity. It is on the transgression of traditional perimeters that technology shows its revolutionary - and destructive - potential. That would mean that the objects we face do not reinforce the limits of our bodies, clarifying the limits of what we are and what we are not. It also means that there is no opposition at all between what we are and what is beyond us. According to Haraway, our subjectivity flows constantly between the materiality of our body and the tools we use. 

Figure 2: a woman using a microscope to enhance her ability to look at a phenomenon or another being.

A character of this transgression can be found as well in popular culture. It was not long ago that Ray Fisher played DC’s character Victor Stone - the Cyborg - on Justice League. The original story tells us that a creature entered our world by passing through a multidimensional portal killing Victor’s mother and injuring the superhero. Victor could only have survived the catastrophe because of the cybernetic additions his father made to his body. Now, his organicity depends on this alien technology, but his humanity and his sense of selfness are stripped away from him when he faces his new life as a cyborg - a cybernetic organism. The relationship with technology is presented at first as the Greek word phármakon - a remedy and a poison. Technology saves Victor’s life but is also a source of aversion for him and for those who see his half metallic body. When we learn about the character’s psychological processes we get in touch with his feeling of technology as self-deprivation of humanity. At the same time, there would be no Victor Stone without technology. But who is Victor Stone when half of his body is substituted? Here, our notion of subjectivity clashes.

Our consciousness relies on our material body to determine who we are. The extension or deformation of subjectivity through a material basis is the most instantaneous one. When technologies that depend on our body’s scan are implemented in our daily lives as they are today, cognition capabilities immediately suffer. For instance, you might use a biometric reader to unlock your phone, either with your face or your finger, to unlock your computer, or to register for your national ID card. That means now that what I share with the tool is my own materiality. The device not only substitutes something to my being but expands and estranges it from me.

While we advance in the history of modern western philosophy, we move from the cartesian conception of subjectivity - a rational irreducible unit - to proposals of a two-way relation between subject and world. That means, the world affects who we are and we affect the world. But at the same time, there must be something intrinsic to ourselves to ground our subjectivity on, otherwise, how can we claim issues such as privacy? I shall explain this question in the following paragraphs.

In common sense, privacy is the state of not being observed by third parties. Following that, there is one well-established conception of privacy: that it varies in degrees. Personal data can be made more or less available, as Nissenbaum discusses. For example, you can have your personal address made public or you can have your Facebook chat with a loved one made public. One is a bigger violation of privacy than the other. But as privacy varies, what is private does not. Therefore I ask, what is the limit of something so mine that no one is entitled to have access to? What are the limits of who I am in order for me to distinguish what I can and what I cannot claim privacy on? 

Most ongoing attempts to solve issues of privacy follow concepts already institutionalized in the General Data Protection Regulation from the European Union (2016). They are: transparency and fairness, in which the purpose for which the data is being collected is clear for the users, purpose limitation, where the data is only used for the purposes presented to the user, data minimization, so the data collector access only the necessary data for its stated purpose and no other data, accuracy, rectifying data that is no longer accurate, storage limitation - deleting personal data if it will no longer be used, and confidentiality, meaning that the data collector must ensure the safety and security of this data. 

Figure 3: the twelve stars from the European Union flag around a padlock.

These considerations entail the idea that everything could be appropriated and distributed as long as some privacy mechanism is fulfilling its role. Nissenbaum also distinguishes information that is neither confidential nor sensitive and asks what are the issues of privacy in these cases. Well, of course there are no objective issues with the measurement of the distance between my eyes and my nose, or the codification of my fingerprints, after all, everyone that crosses with me on the streets has access to my eyes. It is on the subjective level that the issue arises. 

The relentless codification of our bodies, as described for example in the use of biometrics, without the possibility of a reflexive recognition of ourselves - that is, the capacity to recognize our perimeter and to generate a deep understanding of who we are - decisively leads to the impossibility of human beings fully present and whole. That is human beings that understand their subjectivity and are able, as a consequence, to fully recognize and praise other subjectivities, fulfilling this way the social nature of our species. If once again I try to move the mouse with my mind, it will not move. But if I cross with someone on the streets and offer a kind smile, I will receive at least a glance back. This happens because the other person recognized me as a valuable subject. The biometric reader does not react to me because it recognizes a valuable subject, but because it transforms me into its own object. 

Feenberg presents one side of this movement as the paradox of action (2010). Because we are social beings that cannot be decontextualized, when we act, we are affected by our own actions as well. We are agents and sufferers. The dual role is important for the construction of our subjectivity and the further recognition of others as agents and sufferers as well. But with the introduction of biometrics, the aftermath is that we lose a clear delimitation of our entity, and an estranged and objectified relation of us with our own body is placed. 

The objectification of several aspects of our lives is already a current reality. As for the example of our experience being dictated by the clock. Thus it is not a matter anymore of inquiring about what will happen in the long run. What I want is the defense of an ontology: a substantial integer that we can defend in order to secure ethical limits and a valuable intersubjective experience. From the development of technology in the past century, it seems critical to secure at least one indisputable boundary, the materiality of our body.

In the end, the perimeter of who we are suffered a dramatic change. At the pace it was extended, once there are no recognizable borders, on what can we settle our own entity? And if we are able to recognize our own borders, they are already affected by the experiences we went through.

Sources

Cotterell, B. & Kamminga, J. (1990). Mechanics of Pre-Industrial Technology: An Introduction to the Mechanics of Ancient and Traditional Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Feenberg, A. (2002). Postindustrial discourses. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press.

_____. (2010). Ten paradoxes of technology. Techne, 14(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne20101412

Haraway, D. J. (1991) A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 149–181.

Lukács, G. (1975). The ontological bases of human thought and action. The Philosophical Forum, 7(1), 22-37.