Book review: Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race and the Technology Identity
| Author | Randy K Lippert |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612472769 |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Theoretical Criminology
17(1) 129 –138
© The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480612472769
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Book reviews
Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race and the Technology Identity,
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011; 207 pp.: 9780822351351, US$22.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Randy K Lippert, University of Windsor, Canada
Increasingly encountered in various institutions, biometric technologies promise safety
and security and claim to be ushering in a new era of certain identification and verifica-
tion. Biometrics, ‘the science of using biological information for the purpose of identifica-
tion or verification’ (p. 21), includes digital fingerprinting, iris scanning, voice recognition
and facial recognition. But do biometrics function as claimed? At what public cost are
they deployed? Whom do they disadvantage, especially when they fail? If ‘[h]uman bod-
ies are not biometrifiable’ (p. 2), the failure of biometrics would seem to demand consid-
eration, and this is what this excellent book does. Using an approach influenced by Michel
Foucault and Donna Haraway, Magnet explores the failure of biometrics and its conse-
quences through case studies. Magnet argues biometric failure is ‘endemic’ to its func-
tioning (p. 6) and that this failure is intimately linked to systemic inequalities. Thus, she
notes how these technologies often cannot adequately check visually impaired persons’
irises or recognize people with voice disorders, which can have devastating effects on
people’s lives (p. 5). A central concept deployed throughout is ‘corporeal fetishism’, the
notion that biometrics transform bodies into ‘things-in-themselves’ (p. 4) that become
uncoupled from any cultural understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability.
These ‘things’ become commodities that primarily benefit the industry that creates them,
and also the neoliberal advocates who arrange their purchase with public funds as politi-
cally expedient, but hopelessly inefficient, solutions to social problems.
Magnet documents the various ways these technologies fail. Sometimes they are
fooled by moving one’s head back and forth to avoid facial recognition, by placing water
on a scanner, by offering an iris image for scanning rather than an iris or by using a sev-
ered, dead body part to fit an appropriate device (p. 27). Other technologies have unac-
ceptably high error rates or fail in other ways. But, crucially, Magnet argues these
technologies do not merely fail; they fail in particular directions, at public expense, and
to the detriment of particular groups of people. Their design tends to be based on the
able-bodied, middle-class, middle-aged male; those outside privileged categories end up
being systematically misidentified or unverified, with detrimental consequences, such as
being restricted from timely access to essential services or preferred spaces (p. 45). Thus,
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