We all like to think we are unique.
So they might be your DNA, your fingerprints,
iris scans or retinal patterns.
We are always leaving digital traces wherever we go,
and we can never be truly offline.
There's always the suggestion that collecting vast amounts of biometrics
is going to be used for something nefarious.
But it can actually create some incredibly positive situations.
So there's a saying in Chinese -
if you haven't done anything wrong, why would you be scared of ghosts?
Businesses are typically designed to make money
and they will not have, in general,
as much interest in protecting your rights.
You are very much the product.
Fingerprints are something that were used
in very, very early Chinese pottery, for example.
Where the potter would leave their fingerprint in the wet clay.
If you watch television and you read all these forensic fiction,
fingerprints solve everything and the honest truth is they don't.
The fingerprint in isolation has no value
in telling you who the person is
until you have something to compare it with.
DNA is still the gold standard
when we can identify the source of the DNA, whose DNA it is.
What we're not very good at understanding
is how did it get there?
So how did your DNA get on to the knife?
Is it because you used the knife to stab somebody?
Or is it because you shook hands with somebody
who used the knife to stab somebody?
If you look at the little skin creases
that you have over your knuckles,
they're different on every finger,
they're different across your two hands,
they're different on identical twins.
And when infrared light shines on your veins
it interacts with the deoxygenated blood
and your veins stand out like black tramlines.
There is a really strong chance that the hand
and of all the biometrics that we can see in the hand
may well be that 'holy grail' that we search for
which is, it's unique.
So there is a global trend across the world
where computers collect more data.
And therefore governments and corporations
are locked in a race where they're trying to collect
a mass amount of identifying information.
Gathering data about people who live in a city or who live in a borough
is now a critical part of the functioning government.
If you want to allocate your resources properly
you need the data.
Wouldn't it just be wonderful
if you could put your hand or your finger on whatever devices,
it knows exactly who you are,
it knows exactly what your health statistics are,
what the probability is of you catching cancer
because of the gene that you've got -
the options are just limitless.
Netflix released what they thought was
anonymised records of movie watching,
and their aim was to try and improve their recommendation algorithms.
In other words, if you've watched movies A, B and C
you're really quite likely to enjoy watching movie D.
Unfortunately researchers quickly realised
they were able to cross-reference these anonymous records with IMDB,
which is an online movie rating service.
And once you can identify who someone is
you can work out their sexual preferences
to some degree of probability.
It would be taking in all sorts of data from local government,
from your schools, from your workplaces,
from your companies, where you go, your GPS data -
putting it into one single score
which evaluates how trustworthy - in quotation marks - you are.
Like an Uber score
where, with a lower credit score,
you might not be able to borrow money,
you might not be able to travel on public transport.
We're always in a cyber-physical space.
Every place we go to will have some cyber element around it.
There'll be cameras capturing information.
There'll be things that are connecting to your phone
that you may or may not be aware of.
We are always leaving digital traces wherever we go
and we can never be truly offline.
In Shenzhen, when you're crossing the road,
there are CCTV cameras that use facial recognition
to see if you're jaywalking or not
and then identifying who that citizen is
and then sometimes you'll be displayed on a big billboard
on the other side of the road in a sort of 'name and shame' action.
What happens in China and in other countries
is a cautionary lesson for all of us
that unless you have proper regulation
the gathering of your data is a real danger to our human rights.
The landscape is continually changing.
Who would have thought ten years ago
we'd have had all this collection that we have now?
Who would have thought about
the ways data can be used and abused.
So regulation is always chasing where we are
with the current technology.
If they provide you with pages and pages of terms and conditions
well, that's transparent, so we can all read those.
However do we really have the time and the knowledge
to read all of those?
No.
So are we really in a situation where it's not transparent
but it's apparent to us?
Are we aware?
Biometric data is very personal.
It's your data because it's about you.
They're your fingerprints or it's your DNA.
Once it's given away it is incredibly hard,
if not impossible, to take it back.
I have a real conflict
between how much of my information I want to share
and how much information I want to have available to me
when I go to a crime scene.
I want to be able to find the pieces of DNA,
I want to be able to find the fingerprints.
I want to be able to get every single bit of information I can
to make sure justice is served.
But of course here I am, sitting in the middle of that crime scene,
not wanting to give mine.
That old saying,
if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear -
that kind of approach doesn't value our privacy.
If the government said,
"We're going to put a camera in every single bedroom in the country
that would film what happens in your bedroom,
but we assure you we will only turn it on if we think there's suspicion."
I think most members of the public would say,
"I don't have anything to hide
but this is my bedroom, this is private."
In reality, there are so many ways to gather data about you nowadays
and it can give as detailed information, in some ways, about you
as if you were having a camera in your bedroom.
Large size datasets or databases are incredibly useful
but the critical thing is that they are correctly used.
That's going to be a very, very big question that we need to resolve
as this digital word really starts to accelerate around us.