Biometrics, Ownership and Privacy?

symbolic asks: "I just finished watching a small segment of World Business Review on PBS, where the topic of discussion the use of biometrics by employers to not only provide confirmation of identity, but as something to drive other parts of the operation - like tracking employee time. Briefly mentioned were face and iris scans, but as I was watching a picture of someone's iris, I realized that once an employer has captured a scan of your iris (or any biometric data), who has control over it? Does it become part of the cesspool of information trading that occurs between business and government entities? Will trading of someone's biometric information become as ubiquitous as their address or phone number. Is there any reason we should be concerned about this? I'd like to hear what others think about this." Ask Slashdot has previously approached the Biometrics topic for technical issues, but the privacy issue of such data has yet to be addressed. How do you feel about biometric data (or any data derived from your physical makeup, like your genome) being used as another commodity (like your address) in the corporate data exchange?

Comments

Re:Yes!

[cosmosis]

This is another one of my favorite responses - its kind of like saying, "why you are complaining that your torture session with cattle prods on your testicles you little baby, the poor fellow in the other dungeon is getting his limbs and testicles cut off and then dipped in hot oil. Stop your whining you little baby, you got it easy!". Ha!

Uh-oh

[GunFodder]

This is a serious problem. If word ever got out about my enormous shlong then the amount of envy caused could wreak havoc.