Loss of Privacy

From Wired:

The lock that would seem to have thwarted them the most was actually one of the easiest to crack. The Biolock Model 333 is a sleek £126 ($200) lock that combines a mechanical cylinder and fingerprint reader.

The first biometric ATM in Europe is now available at Poland’s cooperative BPS bank. Utilizing a finger vein authentication system by Hitachi, customers now merely need to place their finger on the pad and the machine will read your pattern and dispense money to you.

The company says that an infrared light is passed through the finger to detect a unique pattern of micro-veins beneath the surface – which is then matched with a pre-registered profile to verify an individual’s identity.

“This is a substantially more reliable technique than using fingerprints,” Peter Jones, Hitachi’s head of security and solutions in Europe, told CNN.

“Our tests indicate there is a one in a million false acceptance rate — that’s as good as iris scanning, which is generally regarded as the most secure method.”

Unlike fingerprints, which leave a trace and can be potentially reproduced, finger veins are impossible to replicate, according to Jones, because they are beneath the surface of the skin.

Amusingly, Jones also added that it cannot be read if the finger had been chopped off. So, all the stories you hear about that, it isn’t possible for this to happen. Blood has to be coursing through the veins for it to work.

This may be a first for Europe, but Asia is far ahead of the curve on fingerprint ATMs.

Jones says that there are now over 80,000 biometric ATMs in Japan, currently used by more than 15 million customers.

The machines are also dotted around parts of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and even parts of Africa — where, according to banking analyst Stessa Cohen, they are preferred by rural workers living in remote areas, who are not accustomed to carrying bank cards.

So far though, the technology has failed to penetrate banking markets in the West. Cohen, who works for industry analysts Gartner, believes there are a number of data privacy issues that commercial banks have failed to address.

No one knows what is going to happen to the technology, where the customer information is going to be stored or what will happen if a case of fraud does occur. The false acceptance rate worries many privacy advocates considering that the statistics given means that in a Europe filled with 30 million people, 30 other people could access your account. While that may be an acceptable number to a company, it isn’t to most people.

I’m really not looking forward to have the crap beat out of me so a mugger can drag me to the ATM and take my money. Worse yet, the mugger doesn’t know it doesn’t work with chopped off fingers, so he comes back to kill you because he couldn’t get your money. It’s a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done. Dual or triple identification would be a start.

Biometric ID cards are arising in many nations around the world despite the protests of many. In the past two months there have been numerous stories published concerning various governments pushing biometric ID as the way to protect people from terrorism. What it really does is create a nice database on the population of a country, making everyone identifiable and eroding privacy.

The Ugandan ID is set to include data on tribe, clan, village, and parish, as well as information on spouses. There will also be a provision of up to four wives plus children.

Turkey introduced biometric IDs that will have a digital picture, but no fingerprints on June 1st. Regular passports will be red, while diplomatic passports will be black.

Mozambique introduced their biometric ID in April after a short delay. The Belgian firm, Semlex, fixed the problems that they created with spelling errors and the prevention of Mozambican names from fitting on new biometric passports. The Belgians, however, can’t seem to hang on to their own ID cards, with more than 200,000 people losing them last year. Most of these were in the 18-25 year old range. Girls were particularly susceptible since they left their ID in open handbags

Zambia has introduced a multipurpose electronic national registration card. Kenya is set to employ a similar measure. The cards can be used for voting, accessing banking services, and as driver’s licenses.

Algerian passports now require women to remove their hijab for photographic purposes. A full face is required to meet international standards on their new biometric passports and many men are livid at this decision. The government has said they will not back down on the decision. Many believe it is the politicians objecting to this and not the women themselves.

While not quite a national ID card just yet, voters in Nepal are now required to have photographs and fingerprints taken, which will then be placed on a card with a unique ID number. The information will be stored on a national civil registration list.

Russia is fingerprinting, photographing, and licensing migrant laborers. If you are a highly skilled laborer, however, you will be excluded. Ah, the elite are above the system again.

The Philippines’ new scheme will be run by the postal service. Foreign residents in Saudi Arabia will soon be required to register their fingerprints to access any government service

Bulgaria’s biometric ID system, which is made by Siemens, won’t scale properly. If all the printing stations across the country are running, the system gets blocked. Instead of fixing the software problem, Bulgaria is, instead, running half the systems in consecutive shifts. The system is, essentially, broken and many people cannot obtain their biometric passports. People are waiting months to get their ID. Under the new system, IDs were supposed to be issued within 30 days.

In the United States, there are numerous fights against ID systems every day. There are major fights over a national work ID. Known as The Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information, and Electronic Verification of Employment (BELIEVE) System, it is being pushed by politicians in Washington. It’s riddled with privacy and civil liberties concerns. There are also concerns that, if Americans are forced into a national ID, the US Supreme Court will like the idea, leaving Americans out in the cold.

The United States will also be issuing new green cards. First, they will actually be green. Second, holographic images, and laser engraved fingerprint information will be stored on them. RFID chips will also be used so that customs and border patrol agents can read the card at a distance. Naturally, no one has given a thought about how easy it is to clone a card you can read from far away.

The former airport Clear ID program is back up and running. It is now known as Alclear. The company also wants to expand the ID program to more places than just airports, including places of work.

Biometrics may be here to stay as an accepted practice. IEEE has created a Certified Biometrics Professional program. We learn of new biometric ID schemes every day, from many different countries. While the UK may be scrapping theirs for now, the USA is still fighting to implement one. Its citizens, however, vow to keep protesting against a national ID.

Britain and America may still end up with a national ID. It seems inevitable with so many people willing to line up and give their privacy away just so they can feel better about themselves and claim that they helped a bit with security. Too bad most of it is security theater and they willingly give away hard fought civil liberties in the process.

All you have to do is give big brother a big enough smile and he’ll give you a free ice cream. Facial database FTW and all they had to do is offer a little ice cream to you.

If you happen to be going to Cannes this summer (and, really, if you aren’t, you should be) mega-conglomerate Unilever is ready to tempt you with a treat straight out of Minority Report. The company has set up a vending machine that lets anyone who walks by score some free ice cream. The price? Just smile for the machine’s facial recognition software, which will determine your age, gender and emotion. Only the most happy will get ice cream. The rest? We don’t really know, but we seem to remember something having to do with stolen eyeballs that can be used to trick such systems.

The “Share Happy” machine can sense when it’s being approached, and “captures and measures your smile 15 times a second, and when it’s wide enough, rewards you with ice cream.” Once you hit the jackpot, you can share your winning smile with friends via Facebook. As to who Unilever’s sharing it with, and what they’re doing with it, we can only imagine. But, hey, free ice cream seems like a fair price for helping educate the smart machines and help them build their dossier, right?

From ubergizmo:

The iPhone is equipped with a facial recognition system, dubbed MORIS, that allows the police to snap a picture of the person, which is sent back and compared against a database of bad guys that the state is currently compiling, finding out if you’re on a wanted list or not. While it’s currently using facial recognition, there is also an iris identification feature in the works, along with a fingerprint reader. Of course, it’ll be interesting to see if the iPhone’s camera is good enough to capture minute details of the iris and fingerprints in order to make a positive match, but we’ll see.