A Window into the Soul: Biosensing in Public

TL;DR

This paper explores the emerging privacy challenges posed by biosensing technologies that can remotely and passively collect personal physiological data in public, analyzing their implications and potential legal and social remedies.

Contribution

It creates a taxonomy of biosensed signals, examines privacy concerns in public, and evaluates legal frameworks and social norms related to biosensing privacy.

Findings

Biosensed data can be collected remotely and passively in public spaces.

Current legal frameworks may be insufficient to address biosensing privacy threats.

Social norms are evolving in response to remote biosensing in public.

Abstract

Biosensed information represents an emerging class of data with the potential for massive, systematic, and remote or casual collection of personal information about people. Biosensors capture physiological signals in addition to kinesthetic data to draw intimate inferences about individuals' mental states. The proliferation of sensors makes detection, interpretation, and inference of these previously subtle - or otherwise invisible - emotional and physiological signals possible from proximate and remote locations. These sensors pose unprecedented challenges to individual privacy in public through remote, precise, and passively collected data. This paper examines the unique nature and inferential potential of biosensed data by creating a taxonomy of signals that may be collected remotely, via casual contact, or from traces left behind, and considers how these data may be collected and used to create novel privacy concerns - particularly in public. Since biosignals may often be deduced from visual data, this paper uses historic and recent photography cases to explore how social norms evolved in response to remote collection in public. A contextual integrity privacy heuristic is then used to probe the need for new norms and remedies specifically for biosensing privacy threats. This analysis examines the extensibility of relevant legal frameworks in the European Union (EU) and United States (US) as a privacy remedy, and conclude with a brief outline of possible legal or social remedies that may address privacy needs in public with biosensing technologies.