Do biometrics help or hinder?
by dave.birch
[Dave Birch] You see more and more stories about biometrics coming into everyday use, which leads to a reinforcing cycle. Organisations read stories about biometrics solving problems and so they begin to rephrase their problem as a problem that biometrics can solve. As a result, the market for biometric hype, if not biometric products, has already recovered from the recession. So is this good or bad? Again, let’s use be careful about phrasing: if biometrics did work properly, what are the implications for the connection between real identity and virtual identity? Let’s put the “if they work” thing to one side for the moment. In the right circumstances, they do.
After his fingerprints matched that of a failed asylum seeker of the same name, Singh admitted to immigration officers he’d previously made a “bogus asylum application,” the Home Office said.
[From Home Office: ID cards catch first illegal immigrant | IT PRO]
Aside from the fact that this story was reported as “ID cards catch illegal immigrant” when it should actually have been “biometric database catches illegal immigrant”, it does show that where the uniqueness of an individual is the problem to be solved, biometrics solve it. But it’s less clear what this means when it is extended to systems or which biometrics are a component. One thing to bear in mind is that the systems are used by real people.
However, according to senior officials those employees who have been forced to come on time due to the biometric way of attendance are trying to `sabotage’ the machines.
[From Glitches galore in MCD biometric machines-Delhi-Cities-The Times of India]
I think that the reason this snippet has resonance is that the idea that biometrics are some sort of magic bullet to the “identity problem” is prevalent, yet the thoughtless use of biometrics will not only not solve the identity problem but will also mean a privacy nightmare. To put it simply, if you have to use your thumbprint to buy a packet of cigarettes, and therefore every newsagent and vending machine needs access to some biometric database, and therefore your thumbprint becomes worth stealing, I can’t see how society is any better off. Your thumbprint will be used by teenagers to buy cigarettes and your identity will be stolen.
I’m going to be talking about this kind of thing at the European Patent Forum 2009 in Prague from 28th-30th April 2009. I’m in the session on the topic “Biometrics: Privacy and Identity Theft”. The presentation is scheduled on the second day of the conference, on 29 April, so if any of you are in town, see you there!
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy — Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) [posted with ecto]