Whether it’s touch ID on your phone, airport security, home assistants, or facial recognition, biometric technology has become increasingly necessary in our modern society. It’s inevitably become one of the most powerful tools of today. However, with this power comes the potential to create great harm.

Biometrics is anything related to physical characteristics that can be used to identify individuals. Fingerprints and facial recognition are just a couple of forms of biometrics. The five most common types of biometric identifiers are fingerprints, facial, voice, iris, and palm or finger vein patterns. You’ve probably seen biometrics more often used through touch ID or face ID. Recently, the demand for biometrics technology has been increasing. The global biometric system market is expected to see an 18% annual growth rate through 2025, with the market hitting $57.7 billion in just five years. With so many people using biometric technology, the harm that can be done only increases.

Data breaches can occur due to the usage of this technology.  Once an attacker has obtained your biometric data, they can use it to impersonate you and gain access to your accounts or confidential information. Biometric data is unique to each individual person and cannot be easily changed, making it a valuable target for hackers.  Right now, the United States is experiencing the most data breaches of any country. In 2021, 212.4 million users were affected, compared to 174.4 million in 2020. Clearly, data breaches are becoming increasingly common, which the report explains is due to the potential for yet undetected breaches, and recent attempts have increased in scale, frequency, and sophistication. The costs of these breaches are increasing, with the average global cost of a single breach hovering at $3.62 million. Data breaches can affect anything from your privacy to financial loss. Your personal information may now be in the hands of cybercriminals who could use it for malicious purposes. The impact of a data breach on individuals can be devastating. It can cause financial loss, damage your credit score, and emotional distress. Hackers can use this information to steal a person's identity and commit fraudulent activities, such as opening new accounts or making unauthorized purchases.

While we have objective, costly harms of biometrics, we often overlook the societal implications of this technology. The technology exacerbates systemic racism as it could disproportionately impact people of color, who are already subject to discrimination and violations of their human rights. Houwinng, researcher and policy advisor at Bits of Freedom, explains that Facial recognition surveillance is discriminatory by design. It is less accurate when pointed at women, transgender and non‐binary people, and people of color, meaning these people have a higher risk of being misidentified. This misidentification is detrimental as it can lead to wrongful convictions. Additionally, medical misidentification can be deadly when patients are identified incorrectly. Facial recognition is fundamentally racist because it is concerned with using statistical methods to divide human populations arbitrarily. In the 2018 “Gender Shades'' project, all algorithms performed the worst on darker-skinned females, with error rates up to 34% higher than for lighter-skinned males. This only further exacerbates the systemic discrimination that these minority groups face. While many think of biometrics as a simple way to open a device, there are much larger implications.

Science often gets ahead of society. Whether it be greed or excitement, these things leak into society before we can handle them. Biometrics have the potential to bring so many benefits to our world, but we need to be aware of what we are risking so we understand both the objective and societal impacts.