Professor in sciences of information and communication at Télécom ParisTech Pierre Musso highlights the ambivalence between the desire of internet users to expose their private life and their concern to preserve their freedom.
That changes the marriage of biometrics and digital ?
Pierre Musso.- The development of these technologies places us at the heart of the ambivalence existing between our need for freedom and a protection request more and more strong. To access services, we agree to give our data the most intimate. Sometimes we put the scene on social networks such as Facebook, to gain reputation. This is what the sociologist Serge Tisseron calls ” extimité “.
After fifty years of a system where production is driven by the consumer, in the image of Zara that reconfigures continuously its offer textile according to sales figures, we move into an economy of contribution, where the user is active and individualized. In this new world, biometrics offers the promise of identifying more.
At the expense of our freedom ?
This button in effect to this essential freedom that is the respect for private life. It is necessary to distinguish the authentication, which is necessary to complete a procedure, and the identification of the persons, which poses ethical questions far more profound. First and foremost to the consent, but also that of the purpose of the use of the data, and finally that of the proportionality between the extent of the collection and its use. It is so delicate that some are calling for the ban of the practice.
The door open to all dictatorships ?
It would be tempting, indeed, to think that this manipulation of the data, pushed to the extreme with the biometrics, leads inevitably to the company of widespread surveillance, exceeding that described by Foucault with the image of the panopticon…
