Bodies and Borders: The Long History of Biometric Surveillance

The number of false positives in facial recognition technology has gone down dramatically. That doesn't mean that it has improved. We should be increasingly concerned about the more effective and accurate incursions on our privacy as we develop ever more effective ways to track people across time and space.

In this talk, I discuss the long history of biometric surveillance, charting the analogue precursors to today's digital versions, showing the deep biases embedded in the tracking of humankind by their bodies. I explore the experiment that trades privacy for security and offers neither.