Biometric Hand Scanners vs. Religious Rights

[moggie]

The US doesn't have a monopoly on Christian nuts: Canada has its share. Here's an employment dispute from last year which hinged on a particularly stupid belief.

http://www.mccarthy.ca/article_detail.aspx?id=3618

The company in question introduced a new access control system to the workplace which used biometric scanning to "recognise" each employee's hand:

The biometric scanners implemented by the Employer used infrared light to take an image of the employee’s hand from various angles. The scanner took 91 measurements of the hand’s length, width, thickness and surface area. These measurements were then converted into a nine-digit algorithmic number stored in the biometric scanner’s memory. No image or picture of the employee’s hand was stored in the system, only the nine-digit number. Neither the employee nor the Employer knew the nine-digit number assigned to the employee.

Biometric scanning raises a lot of hackles, of course, but three employees had a novel objection:

The three employees who refused to use the biometric scanners were members of the Pentecostal faith. They asserted that a tenet of their faith was that individuals were to avoid being "marked" by three sequential sixes — 666 — which they believed to be the "mark of the Beast," particularly on one’s forehead or right hand. According to the employees (and expert testimony provided by a Pentecostal pastor), since the biometric scanners generated a nine-digit number for each employee’s hand, the biometric scanners could impose the "mark of the Beast" (i.e., 666) on them and, as a consequence, they would risk damnation.

Damnation! No wonder they objected! The employer tried meeting them halfway:

The Employer attempted to accommodate the employees in numerous ways. The employees were offered the option of using their left hand rather than the right hand (an option that was successful in a U.S. employer’s implementation of biometric hand scanners). The Employer also gave the employees the option of wearing tight fitting gloves around their hands when using the biometric scanners so that the resulting algorithm would not relate to the employee’s actual hand. However, the arbitrator found that these alternatives were contrary to the employees’ sincere religious beliefs, which prohibited the taking of any measurement of a body part that would be quantified by a number.

Pentecostals must have lousy dress sense...

The case was found against the employer, because they had failed to explore enough options for accommodating the Pentecostals, in particular modifying the system to add a non-biometric alternative (which would have cost money).

Applications in which an invisible unique number is assigned to a person are common, of course, but a biometric application in which the number is arrived at algorithmically have the "problem" that you can't simply change the number if the person doesn't like it (other than by, say, cutting off one of their fingers).

I don't like biometrics, but I'd never really considered the religious/superstitious aspect before. And 666 isn't all an implementor needs to worry about: surely a sufficiently deranged person could come up with a numerological objection to their ID, no matter what it was.

Should employers have to take this into account? Or should they be able to say "you think you'll be damned to hell because of the shape of your hand? Forget the access control system, we're firing you because you're too fucking crazy to work here!"

[YankeyMCC]

1. I call bullshit

on the part of the protesting employees. Either that or they are simply insane. They have an agenda, and perhaps it is just a 'look at me, look at me' kind of thing, they would've found any excuse to make a scene and call attention to their piousness.

Another bad effect of religion, easy excuses for acting on wacky agendas.