Biometrics and Personal Data as a Security Concern in the 21st Century?

Abstract

As new security threats emerged from the post-9/11 era, many Western governments decided to increase political surveillance to prevent future terrorist attacks. This era is a demonstration of the securitization concept as new threats have been used to justify exceptional measures. Furthermore, securitization overlaps with the social construction of technology theory as this new socio-political environment shaped the development of surveillance technologies. This thesis explores the relationship between privacy and security in a period of uncertainty. It depicts how the rating culture emerged from modern society's digitalization and what hazards this culture means for Western liberal democracies. Unlike China, the West uses neither a social credit system nor biometric systems for social control. However, this piece demonstrates that the cultural and infrastructural foundations for a social credit system exist in the West as the only missing tool for a system similar to China's is biometric systems. Therefore, this thesis analyzes the risks of Western liberal democracies' digitalization by comparing them to China's model. Eventually, as modern societies' digitalization is inevitable, this piece aims to provide the norms and legal frameworks that should govern biometric systems to respect civil rights...