ABSTRACT
Humanitarian use of biometrics has become an increasingly contested space. Decisions to use biometrics have been scrutinised for their resemblance to colonial methods of control and criticised for potential harm and privacy concerns related to collecting immutable personal information.
This chapter considers how the use of biometrics has shifted over the past decade and how data protection practices have intersected with unfolding biometric use. In particular, it will consider how the uptake of biometrics encourages a unilateral understanding of accountability – one oriented towards responding upwards to the interests of humanitarian organisations and in particular their donors. In this paradigm, biometrics render crisis –affected communities accountable to humanitarian organisations and donors while reducing insight into service provision decisions imposed upon them. This dynamic is juxtaposed against both the promises and the shortcomings of data protection efforts to assist in establishing organisational accountability to impacted communities. By segmenting accountability into the three facets of taking account, giving account, and being held to account, this chapter traces how biometric technologies favour a logic of upward accountability towards humanitarian organisations and donors, over downward accountability to community members.
The chapter draws on several published reports and one unpublished report by the author based on an extensive review of relevant literature and qualitative interviews with key stakeholders across the humanitarian ecosystem, considering biometric use, biometric use policies, and wider humanitarian interest in interoperability, data stewardship, and the identity lifecycle. Additionally, it both speaks to and draws from academic work on critical humanitarian digitalities, the politics of innovation, and accountability challenges regarding humanitarian use of technology. Crucially, this intervention emphasises the importance of a data protection approach to biometrics that proffers a more dynamic cost-benefit analysis that better accounts for biometric-related harms.
