From fingerprints and iris scans to veins and palm prints
By silicon.com, 18 December 2007 14:11
silicon.com's latest Video Cheat Sheet looks at the various types of biometric technology - from fingerprints and irises to veins and facial recognition - and how it is being used by both private sector organisations and the government.
Click on the video window above to find out more from silicon.com's editor Steve Ranger and deputy editor Andy McCue about biometrics - including failure rates, usability issues and faking it.
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Comments
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1. misceng
Biometric accuracy is not good enough. At a lecture to the Instution of Engineering and Technology by advisors to the Government ID card scheme it was admitted during question time that a 1% error rate which could happen would mean that 60,000 innocent UK people could be branded criminal. For instance Asian women apparently have such smooth skin that some cannot produce fingerprints the system can handle.
2. Karen Challinor
a few success stories to big up biometrics including the IPS scheme and school dinners
but
no hard figures on failure rates beyond ranking iris over fingerprint over facial recognition
as far as faking it goes you only mention that it's difficult and a mention of liveness tests that make it moreso
nothing about false positives or negatives
nothing about what happens when someone does successfully spoof your biometric signature for criminal purposes and how you might try proving it wasn't you to a policeman
basically anything you can measure you can fake, and if you can't fake it at the scanning end you can find a point to inject a signal to make it look as if the scanner has seen the genuine article
not exactly the most impartial article I've ever seen, could have been a party political broadcast at some points
3. Jeremy Wickins
Add to misceng's comments that facial and fingerprint accuracy falls off dramatically with age, facial recognition doesn't seem to like very dark skin, and some disabled people are entirely unable to register any biometric at all (and this list is far from complete!) and we see that biometrics are flawed. They are useful in small-scale applications (such as computer access and access control in relatively small organisations), but for large scale applications they are a serious infringement on a significant number of people's access to the things that are accepted as social goods.