Should they? Mobile Biometrics and Technopolicy meet Queer Community Considerations
It raises critical human rights issues for marginalized groups in AI systems, but is incremental as it builds on existing discourse without introducing new technical solutions.
This position paper addresses the privacy and ethical concerns of using smartphone biometric data for identification tasks, highlighting risks of algorithmic bias and dysphoria for the queer community, and proposes opportunities for improved data protections.
Smartphones are integral to our daily lives and activities, providing us with basic functions like texting and phone calls to more complex motion-based functionalities like navigation, mobile gaming, and fitness-tracking. To facilitate these functionalities, smartphones rely on integrated sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. These sensors provide personalized measurements that, in turn, contribute to tasks such as analyzing biometric data for mobile health purposes. In addition to benefiting smartphone users, biometric data holds significant value for researchers engaged in biometric identification research. Nonetheless, utilizing this user data for biometric identification tasks, such as gait and gender recognition, raises serious privacy, normative, and ethical concerns, particularly within the queer community. Concerns of algorithmic bias and algorithmically-driven dysphoria surface from a historical backdrop of marginalization, surveillance, harassment, discrimination, and violence against the queer community. In this position paper, we contribute to the timely discourse on safeguarding human rights within AI-driven systems by providing a sense of challenges, tensions, and opportunities for new data protections and biometric collection practices in a way that grapples with the sociotechnical realities of the queer community.