3 - Images and Biometrics – Privacy and Stigmatisation

Summary

Privacy law, especially in the form of the right to private life in Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, has addressed police photography, biometrics, and filing systems, including when police identification images are taken in public, outside of the context of arrest. The law slowly came to recognise that the building of institutional identity databases was a meaningful and potentially objectionable practice because it could stigmatise people with information in those filing systems who had not been convicted. This chapter outlines the development of that legal constraint on profiling, as well as its limitations, such as expanding law enforcement intelligence practices. It argues that privacy becomes meaningful for government profiling only when the ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ test is abandoned, and with a focus on data processing, image identification, and ‘systematisation’.