Principal Investigator: Emilio Mordini, Center for Science, Society and Citizenship, Rome

HastingsCenter Principal Investigators: Thomas Murray and Karen Maschke

Funder:European Commission

Project Newsletter:Dialogue

Purpose

To establish a platform for an international dialogue on the most controversial ethical and privacy issues raised by personal detection technologies and their applications. 

Key Issues

Many technologies that measure and analyze human body characteristics are under development for security, criminal background checks, and identifying suspected terrorists. The technologies include infrared detectors and thermal imaging, transponders, body scanners, and smart cards. Ethical issues include: What are the tradeoffs between privacy and public security? What are the concerns raised over the exposure of highly personal details from body scans? What are the risks of outsourcing personal information processing and storage?  

Intended Products

Several integrated activities, including focus groups, policy forums, and problem solving workshops.

Participants

Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship (Italy)

Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (United Kingdom)

Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Look Lin School of Medicine (Singapore)

Eutelis Italia (Italy)

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Electrical Engineering  (Slovenia)

Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research, Department of Security Technology  (Germany)

International Biometric Group (United States)

Optel Ltd. (Poland)

Sagem Defense Security (France)

The Hastings Center (United States)

Zuyd University, Informatics, New Media & Society (Netherlands)