What risks to personal privacy are emerging from the increasing ability to identify data characteristics unique to a person?

Background

"Identification and tracing is the ability to trace, attribute, and confirm the identity of a person, location or activity to evidential levels, such as tracing missing persons.

Emerging biometrics can be used to ascertain or impersonate a person’s identity. Advances in analysing microbiomes (the combination of microbes unique to individuals) and genetics could lead to new ways to identify and track criminals from traces left behind. Similarly, as computational power increases, so the ability to measure and identify data characteristics unique to a person increase. This puts at risk people’s right to privacy while, simultaneously, providing new ways to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt a person’s location, supporting existing forensic approaches. We are keen to understand what potential criminal and investigative opportunity is emerging and what the limits are of biometrics."

Next steps

"We welcome your engagement with our ARIs in the following ways:
• If you have evidence that completely or partly supports or answers one of our ARIs, we invite you to share that with us. For any ongoing research relevant to policing and crime reduction, we encourage you to register your research on the College of Policing’s research projects map, which has been designed to promote collaboration and support requests for participants.
• If you are, or plan to be, carrying out research that relates to one of our ARIs, we’d like to hear about it. While we cannot respond to speculative approaches for research funding, we will where possible act to support your ambitions, including finding you policing partners where possible.
• If you are submitting a funding or grant application that aligns with one of our ARIs, we hope that referencing policing’s ARIs will help to strengthen your case for the possible public impact of the research.
• We will use the ARI document to structure our academic engagement, prioritise events and build new connections with external partners. We will be using our ARIs in our engagement with UKRI, and we will publish any opportunities for funding via our website https://science.police.uk/
Please send any correspondence and questions to csa@npcc.police.uk, including ‘ARI’ in the subject heading."

Source

This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:

Policing Areas of Research Interest

Related UKRI funded projects


  • SID: An Exploration of Super-Identity

    The capacity to identify one another is paramount. It underpins social dialogue, commercial transactions, individual entitlements to goods and services and issues of legal and criminal responsibility. In today's society,...

    Funded by: EPSRC

    Lead research organisation: University of Southampton

    Why might this be relevant?

    The SID project explores the identification of individuals, including biometrics and data characteristics unique to a person, addressing privacy risks and forensic opportunities.

  • Privacy Value Networks

    Identity and privacy have recently rarely been out of the headlines. Government has justified the need to identify citizens and track behaviour or security reasons, and promoted data sharing with the promise of the benef...

    Funded by: EPSRC

    Lead research organisation: University of Oxford

    Why might this be relevant?

    The Privacy Value Networks project focuses on the value of personal data, risks of data collection, and stakeholders' perceptions, relevant to privacy risks from identifying unique data characteristics.

  • Seminar series on genetics, technology, security and justice. Crossing, contesting and comparing boundaries

    Security concerns - about crime, terrorism, mass death atrocities and disasters - are a key driver for the development of new technologies, and human genetics research has played an important contribution here. DNA techn...

    Funded by: ESRC

    Lead research organisation: Northumbria University

    Why might this be relevant?

    The Seminar series on genetics, technology, security and justice addresses the challenges and opportunities of forensic genetic technologies, including privacy concerns related to identification and security efforts.

  • TENSOR - Reliable biomeTric tEhNologies to asSist Police authorities in cOmbating terrorism and oRganized crime

    TENSOR will provide LEAs a platform that facilitates the biometric evidence extraction, sharing and storage in cross border environments allowing them to share best practices in an automated, robust, secure, privacy-pres...

    Funded by: Horizon Europe Guarantee

    Lead research organisation: THRIDIUM LIMITED

  • Privacy Risk Assessment Methodology

    Organisations responsible for data protection must demonstrate that sharing data for research does not put individuals at undue risk of harm. Such harms relate to a person’s right to privacy, for example, someone’s ident...

    Funded by: MRC

    Lead research organisation: University of Southampton

  • Data Release - Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security

    The Open Data Initiative (ODI) demonstrates that there is a growing ambition from government to publish internal data as open data sets. (See https://data.gov.uk). Data custodians, particularly large governmental organis...

    Funded by: EPSRC

    Lead research organisation: Swansea University

  • EnCoRe

    In order to gain access to the many services and benefits of society, individuals are increasingly required to provide personal information via the Internet to companies, government bodies and other institutions. It is l...

    Funded by: EPSRC

    Lead research organisation: University of Oxford

  • Privacy Value Networks

    The Privacy Value Networks project (PVNets) is funded by the Technology Strategy Board as part of the EPAC (Ensuring Privacy And Consent) initiative. PVNets is a major three-year research project that will produce a str...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: CONSULT HYPERION LIMITED

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