Are you fed up with having to carry 2,762 separate plastic cards in your wallet for buying gas, getting Air Miles, withdrawing money, renting videos and collecting frequent-ice-cream-eater points? Then you’ll be glad to hear about biometrics.
Biometrics is the measurement of tiny differences among individuals for the purposes of identification. Fingerprinting is probably the best known example. High-security military, government and industrial facilities have been using biometrics for years, but thanks to the increasing power and decreasing cost of computers, it’s spreading to the everyday world.
Fingerprint identification remains one of the most popular types of biometrics, because the public already accepts fingerprints as unique. As well, they’re particularly easy to digitize. In electronic fingerprinting systems, a scanner takes an electronic black-and-white picture of the fingertip, then searches its database for a match.
While people accept that fingerprints a good way to identify individuals, unfortunately, they also connect fingerprinting with criminal investigation, which gives it a certain stigma. Nevertheless, the Connecticut Department of Social Services, for example, has used fingerprint identification since January of 1997. Benefit recipients have to place their finger in a scanner before receiving their cheques. The state figures it has saved millions of dollars by catching welfare cheaters.
In another form of biometrics, users place their entire hand into a device that takes two infrared pictures of it, one from above and one from the side, and compares 90 measurements, including width, thickness and surface area, with a previously stored template. The military uses these “hand geometry” devices; so does the Mayfair Racquet and Fitness Club in Toronto.
In the mid 1980s two opthamologists proposed identifying individuals by the patterns of light and dark in their irises. Iris-scanning devices take a high-resolution picture of the iris with an electronic camera, divide it into eight concentric zones, record the variations in shading in each zone and encrypt it all into something like a bar code, unique for each individual–even between identical twins. The process can be carried out from up to a metre away, and takes only two or three seconds. The Japanese Racing Association is already using iris scanning to identify the 10,000 thoroughbreds in its system. (Iris scans shouldn’t be confused with retinal scans, which shoot a beam of light into the eyeball and record the formation of veins inside the eye.
Face recognition devices photograph whole faces, then analyze the features or the distance between features. Face recognition can be used from dozens of metres away. In Britian, police are already using face recognition to monitor one high-crime neighborhood, where 140 cameras continuously compare street photos with a complete log of 2,000 criminals.
Voice recognition measures the wave patterns generated by the tone of a person’s voice, which cannot be duplicated by even the best impersonator. Some researchers are even experimenting with equipment that would distinguish individuals by their distinctive body odor!
None of these systems offers perfect security. You can tune a biometric system so it catches everyone who isn’t supposed to have access, but you may end up stopping far too many people who are supposed to have access. Biometric systems are tuned to achieve an acceptable balance between those two outcomes. A military facility will tune it toward the strict side, while a system designed to keep your kid sister from playing on your computer would probably be tuned toward the lenient side.
Most current biometric systems can also be tricked. Some iris scanners can be fooled with a high-resolution photograph, for instance, and fingerprint scanners (and I know you were wondering this) can be fooled by a freshly severed finger, or even a well-constructed fake one. A bigger problem, however, is that people change over time. Most systems update their information every time you use them, but if you don’t use the system regularly, you may come in (after you break your nose, for example) and find that you’re no longer recognized.
Coming uses for biometrics include credit cards that will only work for the person whose fingerprint matches the print encoded on a chip in the card, and bank machines that recognize you without a bank card. The Wells Fargo Bank in the U.S. is already using face-recognition software, and NCR is testing a bank machine equipped with an iris scanner.
Soon, with any luck, we may be able to say goodbye to plastic cards of every stripe–and maybe all of us men can quit listing to the left while we sit.
