Data about your body is up for sale. Who's buying it?
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Flora and you are listening to Science Friday. |
| 0:06.5 | If you're one of the millions of Americans who leave the house, prepare for your close-up because |
| 0:13.6 | cameras are everywhere. Your neighbor's ring camera catching you as you walk by. The grocery store security camera looking at you as you shop. |
| 0:23.7 | The plate reader capturing you in the car. |
| 0:26.4 | These images are a type of biometric data, and more and more biometric data is being collected. |
| 0:32.0 | So what happens to it? |
| 0:33.8 | And if you have nothing to hide, should you care? |
| 0:36.5 | Here to talk about that is Anne Toomey McKenna. |
| 0:38.9 | She's an attorney specializing in privacy and biometric surveillance. And she's on the AI advisory |
| 0:43.9 | counsel for the ICCI, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Hey, Anne, welcome to |
| 0:49.8 | Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Thank you for being here. Yeah. You know, we hear |
| 0:55.7 | this word biometrics a lot. How should we define it? Biometrics is something that should be really |
| 1:01.9 | broadly defined. So a way to think about biometrics are really measurable characteristics |
| 1:08.7 | about you. And those measurable characteristics could include |
| 1:13.6 | things like health data, right? Your particular heart rate, what is your heart rate variability? |
| 1:21.7 | Your biometrics could be not just your eyes and particular features of your retina to identify you from a retinal scan |
| 1:30.5 | or to be able to identify you from the shape of your face but your particular pattern of walking |
| 1:36.1 | your gate or the way you hold your phone so your phone is collecting biometric data of all kinds, right? Not just your image. And I think |
| 1:47.9 | that's an important thing to remember because so much of the attempts by states to protect |
| 1:52.6 | biometric privacy really go to facial recognition privacy. But I think it would be helpful |
| 1:58.1 | to think of biometrics more broadly, right? Not just your face, not just your fingerprint, but really all of these idiosyncratic or very specific measurements that reflect things about you and make it identifiable to be you. |
| 2:15.3 | And it's not just your phone taking this data either, right? Typically. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Science Friday and WNYC Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Science Friday and WNYC Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.