On Biometrics and Profiling: A Challenge for Privacy and Democracy?

This paper advances an analysis of biometrics and profiling. Biometrics represents the most effective technology in order to prove someone’s identity. Profiling regards the capability of collecting and organizing individuals’ preferences and attitudes as consumers and costumers. Moreover, biometrics is already used in order to gather and manage biological and behavioral data and this tendency may increase in Ambient Intelligence context. Therefore, dealing with individuals’ data, both biometrics and profiling have to tackle many ethical issues related to privacy on one hand and democracy on the other. After a brief introduction, the author introduces biometrics, exploring its methodology and applications. The following section focuses on profiling both in public and private sector. The last section analyzes those issues concerning privacy and democracy, within also the Ambient Intelligence.