Biometric technologies are increasingly used in order to control access to political rights, such as voting, welfare benefits, etc.
Identification cards with digitised fingerprints are being used in elector identification of voters in some countries (e.g. Mexico and Spain).
Biometric identification is also being introduced in national health care systems, as for example in the Canadian province of Ontario, in Los Angeles and Connecticut. Spain is developing a smart card for all welfare and pension benefits.
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Identity has to do with "place". In less mobile societies, the place where a person finds him/herself tells us something about his/her identity. In pre-industrial times, gatekeepers had the function to control access of people to particular places, i.e. the gatekeepers function was to identify people and then decide whether somebody's identity would allow that person to physically occupy another place - a town, a building, a vehicle, etc.
In modern societies, the unambiguous nature of place has been weakened. There is a great amount of physical mobility, and ever since the emergence and spread of electronic communication technologies there has been a "virtualisation" of places in what today we call "virtual space" (unlike place, space has been a virtual reality from the beginning, a mathematical formula) The question as to who one is no longer coupled to the physical abode. Highly mobile and virtualised social contexts require a new generation of gatekeepers which biometric technology aims to provide.
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