Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Baseball and DNA

Should baseball teams be prohibited from DNA-testing prospective players?

Here's the background, provided by the New York Times:

Confronted with cases of identity and age falsification by Latin American baseball prospects, Major League Baseball is conducting genetic testing on some promising young players and their parents. Many experts in genetics consider such testing a violation of personal privacy. Federal legislation, signed into law last year and scheduled to take effect Nov. 21, prohibits companies based in the United States from asking an employee, a potential employee or a family member of an employee for a sample of their DNA.

It looks to me as though the tests should be allowed in this case, but with certain conditions.

1. You can test for contractual identity fraud, not necessarily for medical conditions. According to the Times,

Major League Baseball said that it used DNA testing in the Dominican Republic "in very rare instances and only on a consensual basis to deal with the identity fraud problem that the league faces in that country." The statement added that the results of the tests were not used for any other purpose. ... The DNA test does not reveal an age, but it can reveal whether the player is the son of his claimed parents. Players have been known to find families willing to lend a younger child's birth certificate so that a player can appear younger.

2. There has to be a prior evidentiary basis for suspecting fraud. In this case, there is. "Dozens of Latin American prospects in recent years have been caught purporting to be younger than they actually were as a way to make themselves more enticing to major league teams," says the Times. Several years ago, "more than 300 players in the major and minor leagues were found to have falsified their birthdates, according to Baseball America."

3. Less invasive verification methods must be tried first. Baseball investigators "look into whether prospects are being truthful about their identities and ages," the Times reports. "If those findings are inconclusive, the player is invited to clear up the concerns by providing a DNA sample from himself and his parents, according to [a league] official." And DNA isn't the only way to check your story against your body: "Some players have also had bone scans to be used in determining age range."

4. All testing and records must be controlled by an independent party. Here's where the league has to change its policy. When queried by the Times, "[a] spokesman for Major League Baseball declined to say how many players had been tested and whether the results were stored or destroyed." Furthermore, in at least one case, a prospective player says he "provided samples of his blood, urine and feces to Major League Baseball investigators so they could assess his DNA and any possible use of performance-enhancing drugs."

These practices won't cut it. DNA tests for identity fraud should be permitted precisely because they aren't tests for predicting future health. The two practices have to be kept separate. To guarantee this, any DNA sample or records that can be used to make inferences about health must be either destroyed or retained by an agent who is not under the control of the employer. The point isn't that employers are never entitled to information about health conditions. The point is that such information, if permitted, must be sought and approved separately.

It won't surprise me if these issues end up in the Supreme Court within the next few years. And it won't surprise me if the ruling includes these four conditions.

Ask for the Manager

I'm sitting here with four passports on my desk. They all have photos. The subject of one looks like a 9/11 hijacker. Another looks like a high-school boy delivering pizza. Another looks like a washed-out ex-kid TV star who's been busted for drugs. Another looks like a Latin American child who needs a liver transplant.

The people in the photos are, respectively, me, my wife, my son, and my daughter.

I'm sharing this embarrassing information with you for two reasons. One, because it's already in the possession of the U.S. government and every government that coordinates with ours. And two, because today's news file brings us a story from the Guardian about British plans to scan passengers at airport gates using face-recognition software. The idea is to "improve security and ease congestion."

The scans certainly will improve security. But that's because of a human decision as to how the machines will be programmed. And that decision, in turn, might exacerbate, rather than ease, congestion. To make this kind of technology work, we have to understand that it requires human management and human assistance.

Face-recognition software looks for a match between the passenger at the gate and a stored photo. There are two kinds of photos you can ask the computer to match. One is a collection of bad guys whose pictures the government has stored in a database. The other is the photo stored by the government as the face that goes with the chip in your passport. Let's call the first kind a suspect scan and the second an ID scan.

If we set up the scanner to look for suspect matches and it can't match you to any of the bad guys in the database, you go through. But if we set up the scanner to look for an ID match and it can't match you to your passport photo, you have a problem. The suspect scan puts the burden of matching on the computer. The ID scan puts the burden of matching on you.

My passport photo was taken nine years ago. I had a lot more hair. I wasn't wearing glasses. I looked tanner and stronger. Last month, when I went through airport security, the officer took a good, long look at both me and my passport. She had to look past the changes of nine years and evaluate both images for subtle similarities.

If she'd been a computer, I probably would have flunked that test. Remember, the whole point of using computers to relieve congestion is that they'll scan us and render their decisions more quickly than humans do. My wife might have flunked, too. And even though my kids' photos were taken just a month ago, I can see how the sheer weirdness of staged photography and the randomness of how they looked that day could cause them to be bounced as well.

This is the problem with the British plan. According to Guardian reporter Owen Bowcott, "Unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports." In other words, it's an ID scan. If the computer can't match you to your ID, you flunk. And there's nobody at the gate to follow up. You have to get in some other line or go through "additional checks."

It's not clear what "additional checks" means. Here's what it should mean: If the computer flunks you, a human being is on hand to give you and your photo a visual scan. Experts point out to Bowcott that current face-recognition software errs strongly on the side of not finding matches. That's fine: The decision to insist on ID matches is a human decision, and it does enhance security. But if you want to ease congestion at the same time, the computer's failure to match you to your photo can't be treated as a conclusion. It has to be treated as an initial sorting process that directs you to old-fashioned human scanners.

"There is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate," Bowcott reports. I'll say. I'm a fan of high-tech security scans, even when they see through your clothes. But technology alone is never enough. The buck still stops with us.