Data about your body is up for sale. Who’s buying it?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora, and you are listening to Science Friday. If you’re one of the millions of Americans who leave the house, prepare for your close up because cameras are everywhere, your neighbor’s ring camera catching you as you walk by, the grocery store security camera looking at you as you shop, the plate reader capturing you in the car.

These images are a type of biometric data, and more and more biometric data is being collected. So what happens to it? And if you have nothing to hide, should you care?

Here to talk about that is Anne Toomey McKenna. She’s an attorney specializing in privacy and biometric surveillance. And she’s on the AI Advisory Council for the IEEE, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Hey, Anne. Welcome to Science Friday.

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: Hey, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you for being here, yeah. We hear this word biometrics a lot. How should we define it?

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: Biometrics is something that should be really broadly defined. So a way to think about biometrics are, really, measurable characteristics about you. And those measurable characteristics could include things like health data, your particular heart rate, what is your heart rate variability?

Your biometrics could be not just your eyes and particular features of your retina to identify you from a retinal scan or to be able to identify you from the shape of your face, but your particular pattern of walking right, your gait, or the way you hold your phone. So your phone is collecting biometric data of all kinds, not just your image.

And I think that’s an important thing to remember because so much of the attempts by states to protect biometric privacy really go to facial recognition privacy. But I think it would be helpful to think biometrics more broadly, not just your face, not just your fingerprint, but really all of these idiosyncratic or very specific measurements that reflect things about you and make it identifiable to be you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And it’s not just your phone taking this data either, typically.

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: Yeah. We live in an ecosystem of surveillance with all of our smart devices, but it’s also everything around us. To participate in modern society is to consent to pervasive and persistent surveillance.

Your car is loaded with sensors. It’s collecting your weight. You sit on the seat. You put your hands on the steering wheel. Modern cars can collect your heart rate from the steering wheel.

You then are looking ahead. Your face, there’s a camera that’s looking at your face. And people say, what? How’s that possible?

But if you’ve ever gotten the attention alert from a modern car, that’s because it’s scanning your face to see, are your eyes on the road? And are you focused and paying attention?

So you pull into the gas station. The gas station owner likes to make sure that what goes on their property. So they have surveillance camera. That surveillance camera picks you up. But they have a contract with the camera vendor. So they’re getting the footage, but a camera vendor is also getting that footage that’s in the cloud.

And as AI systems advance, more and more insights can be gleaned. And those insights can be like, who is the person? What is their emotional state as they’re looking at something? What are they wearing? What’s the significance of that?

FLORA LICHTMAN: And then I guess I could be marketed to very effectively.

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: That’s exactly it. At the end of the day, this surveillance is something that has been termed by a brilliant professor, Shoshana Zuboff, surveillance capitalism. And surveillance capitalism is just that. You make money when you know information about people because you can target them so specifically.

The problem is that it’s not– the massive quantities of data that are collected about you aren’t just from walking into stores. I think it’s important that we recognize what’s being collected about you is often occurring through apps on your smartphones and your other devices. The software embedded in there is collecting just all kinds of data.

And that data is valuable, yes, to market things to you, but it’s also invaluable for insurance companies. Insurance companies want to, what’s your health like? Are you more expensive risk to insure? Financial entities want to all kinds of information about you because they’re going to factor that into the rates that you’re charged for, say, a credit card or even for a mortgage.

So you have all of these private entities that collect all of this data, much of it biometric data. And all of that data gets aggregated, and it gets put into– well, it becomes, what we call commercially available information. And it ends up in a massive data market, where data brokers are constantly buying and selling it.

Your data is money, and it’s worth a lot of money because it tells us so much. I guess the underside that’s a little more concerning and dangerous is that law enforcement can access that data by buying it. And we have example after example of data brokers and private companies having contractual relationships with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to sell that data.

So it’s both your data is being collected to make money off of you so you can be targeted for advertising. It’s being collected so it can be sold to many players. But those players can include law enforcement.

So it’s a market that’s incredibly unregulated as well. The US, we’re just behind on data privacy regulation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right, right. I mean, we’ve talked about this with other types of data on the show. But I think people have this sense, myself included, or had this sense that the amount of data in the data set automatically gives people some anonymity. How would it be possible to compile all of these separate data streams for everybody? Is that true anymore?

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: Yeah, no, it’s not true anymore because of the power of AI, the ability to analyze just mind bogglingly some astonishing amounts of information to glean insights about a particular person and target that specific person. Micro-targeting, micro advertising is something that occurs almost instantaneously.

And it’s AI systems that enable that. And I think that’s really hard for the average person to wrap their brain around. They think, oh, I’m safe because it’s just really data about everyone, but that’s just not the case.

As a retailer could collect information– or really, anyone who wants to buy it could collect information about, I want information on all the people who like this particular band, are gender fluid, and shop in this store. That’s how specific you can get. And that ability to identify very specific traits about persons and to target specific persons is no longer a complicated process. It is an instantaneous process in data analytics.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How do these systems identify me personally? After a picture of me is taken, is it compared to some big database somewhere of photos? How does that work?

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: Yeah, it depends. Different companies have what we term face banks. And it’s not just different companies that have face banks.

Law enforcement has face banks, and those face banks help them to identify. So let’s say a Flock camera picks up a group of people at a protest. Law enforcement can take that footage and compare it to massive existing face banks that they have. So think about everybody’s driver photo, everybody’s social media activity.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Your social media activity could land you in a face bank?

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: Oh, yes, because it’s publicly available information that can be scrubbed.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It can just be read and slurped up.

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: Correct. And that’s the thing about agentic AI, these generative AI systems. They just go around and scoop up the data.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think a lot of people might have this temptation to think like, well, I have nothing to hide, so therefore I’m not going to worry about this. You’re a lawyer. I’m sure you have a thought on this.

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: First of all, I have nothing to hide. Well, if laws change, like if from a criminal perspective, think about what happened with Dobbs. Overnight in some states, activity that was lawful the day before became unlawful. So the criminal piece of it is a real significant issue.

But what it’s not appreciating is, well, did you have two donuts and you’re having two donuts every morning? Does that mean your insurance premiums should be higher? You should pay more for health care?

And an employment search, employers now want to know, and there’s companies that make so much money selling to employers searches, instantaneous background searches on potential employees. And that includes your social media activity. That can include posts and things you said.

Data brokers know what your sexual preferences are. Data brokers know what your faith is or your spiritual state is. They know what kind of books you like to buy. They know what kind of music you listen to. It’s not about, are you going to go to jail for this now?

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do we do, Anne? In 30 seconds.

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: We need to have effective data privacy regulation. That the United States is the United States and doesn’t have that at a federal level leaves us alone among the world’s nations.

And finally, as citizens, we do have rights. We have a Fourth Amendment that protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures. And we should not allow these loopholes simply to profit tech.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Anne, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

ANNE TOOMEY MCKENNA: Thanks. It was a pleasure talking with you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Anne Toomey McKenna is an attorney specializing in privacy and biometric surveillance. She’s also affiliate faculty at the Penn State Institute for computational and data sciences. This episode was produced by Annette Heist.

Just look for me on your Ring Cam. I’ll be wearing that hat that said, rate and review Science Friday. No, seriously, please help us out so I don’t actually have to do that. Thank you for listening. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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