Gli algoritmi dell'identità: il corpo umano

[Autom. eng. transl.] Biometrics seems to be the adequate response to the need for identification within a global society since it allows recognition on the basis of possession no more than something "given" or "communicated" by a guarantor authority, but on "What one is", on one's own body. This solution, while apparently referring to premodern "biometric systems" represents, on closer inspection, an epochal revolution: the change brought by new technologies (including those in the field of genetics) in the biometric field is constituted by the fact that these procedures more sophisticated involve an automatic and extensive application, the possibility of a modification of the body, a technical ability to interfere with the person, the possibility of detecting data that variously crossed can give rise to phenomena of "profiling" (a "profile") of our tastes, of our habits, of our reliability, which is immediately activated together with the biometric data and, without our knowledge, cards and classifies them irreparably) or which go beyond the mere need for identification. The most striking cases are those of the method of recognition of the retina, which can indicate the presence of hypertension or diabetes, or the analysis of the iris, which can highlight the use of alcohol or drugs. This sensitive information is assumed regardless of the subject's will and increases the risks of "profiling", because it could be used, without his knowledge, for example in the selection for a job, in the granting of a mortgage or in the calculation of the premium of an insurance policy. Furthermore, the creation of computerized databases opens up a series of questions deriving not only from the nature and number of information that can be gathered but also from the different uses that can be made of it (the problem is not the assumption of the single data that is exhausted within a specific event but its conservation tends to be without time limits within a computer system). Since the end of the sixties, the nascent computer industry had automated the techniques for detecting some biometric data (including that of fingerprints and the structure of the iris). They were built, as they still are today, starting from a reader (scanner) that reproduces the biometric data of the person (shape of the iris, fingerprints, geometry of the face ...) and a software that converts them into an electronic medium digital form through an algorithm and, since the algorithms used are different, each biometric system creates different models (templates) of the same physical characteristic and, depending on the type of identification chosen, different parameters of reliability are recorded with reference to the outcome. But, if then, these technologies were very expensive and unreliable, today, the situation has changed radically to the point of glimpsing the possibility of scenarios that are still difficult to predict both from the ethical-anthropological and legal point of view since they, as "devices of possession", they operate at different levels. The first, the most obvious, is due to the dispersion of the many traces we leave and which, once manipulated and reworked, are stolen and constitute a fictitious image of ourselves that overlaps with the real one, classifying, marginalizing and, sometimes , condemning. A second level of analysis of the possible effects of biometrics seems to affect even more radically the spaces of freedom in the case of the next replacement of any personal data (identity card) with the biometric data from which a new form of social duty could derive, that to keep their biometric data intact, thus becoming one of the basic elements