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.