Loss of Privacy

It has been said many times that using biometric scanners as your only means of security is doomed to fail. They have been beaten before and, now, Brazilian doctors have devised a way to bypass biometric scanners using fake fingers.

Thaune Nunes Ferreira, a doctor at the hospital in the town of Ferraz de Vasconcelos, greater São Paulo, was arrested with six fake fingers with the fingerprints of six other people. She is accused of using prosthetic fingers to fool the biometric employee attendance device.

The town’s mayor, Acir Fillo, has also asked five employees of the medical service said to have been involved to step aside, while the local council has launched a public inquiry into the matter.

Brazil’s ministry of health has said it will launch an inquiry of its own into the local hospital.

Mr Fillo says that the police investigation showed that some 300 public employees in the town, whom he described as ”an army of ghosts”, had been receiving pay without going to work.

Bankok Post says that there is video footage of Ferreira clocking in with the fake fingers.

Globo television showed footage of a doctor touching her finger to the device, then using two fake digits to do the same for colleagues, and taking delivery of slips of paper indicating they had in fact clocked in to work.

That way it looked like there were doctors on duty when there was just one.

Another television network said it was the head of the emergency room that ran the scam and that his daughter had not worked a day in three years but got paid all the time.

Ferreira says that she was forced to clock in for other doctors as it was a condition of her employment.

The Province added:

Ferreira confessed to using different fake fingers bearing the prints of 11 fellow doctors and 20 nurses in order to pretend they were showing up to work five overnight shifts each month, instead of just one, police said.

Ferreira also said the staff at the Ferraz Vasconcelos Hospital paid $2,400 per month to participate.

The problem with these machines is that there is a trust factor. It would not have taken much time to check, for example, to see if the daughter of the emergency room head was actually working. Blindly believing that biometric scanners will solve your problems is just asking for the massive amount of fraud and abuse that you receive. Biometric scanners, practically, are only useful in highly secured and controlled environments where someone is there to monitor the person using the scanner. Used anywhere else and they become a broken system rife with abuse.

More.

The US is funneling money into tracking systems that are threatening to make the very concept of privacy a thing of the past. It could mean people’s every move being used against them to keep them under surveillance.

Source.

Photograph courtesy Isao Echizen of Tokyo’s National Institute of Informatics.

Over the past few years, facial recognition has been used in conjunction with more and more technology. It’s been used with CCTV, Facebook, and mannequins in stores. Japanese researchers, Isao Echizen, an associate professor at Tokyo’s National Institute of Informatics, and Seiichi Gohshi, a professor at Kogakuin University, have now invented a visor that can hide its user from any facial recognition technology.

After months of research, the duo invented a pair of high-tech glasses that emit a near infrared light to block face recognition cameras. It was their goal to counter what they call the “invasion of privacy caused by photographs taken in secret.”

The glasses, currently in prototype form, are hardly what you would term stylish. They are essentially a pair of clunky-looking lab goggles. Attached to them are small circular lights that, when turned on, are visible only to cameras. They are connected to a wire and a battery that you have to carry in your pocket. But though the design might require a few tweaks, the concept has been attracting significant attention in Japan, where it has been featured on TV.

Such anti-facial recognition technology has been gaining attention elsewhere as well. Adam Harvey recently had a show displaying his anti-surveillance clothing. Harvey has previously showed people how different facial paint can fool facial recognition technologies.

While the current visor is quite ugly, further developments could make them smaller and less conspicuous to the general public.

From NPR:

The FBI plans to move forward with a facial recognition system that’s set to be fully implemented by 2014. Facial recognition is just one part of many biometric tools the FBI eventually plans to use to gather and store intelligence information, including fingerprint searches and iris scans.