Loss of Privacy

There’s a new fingerprint scanner in Elmbridge and the upscale clientele at the bar have met it with skepticism and suspicion.

The technology at Noir Bar is the first in Elmbridge and is in addition to Clubscan, which scans and stores ID on entry to alert licensees about underage drinkers or banned customers in pubs and clubs.

The bar, formerly Abaya, voluntarily installed the scanner, which started working two weeks ago.

Simon Bate, licensing enforcement officer at Surrey Police, said: “If that is their condition of entry, then those are their house rules. You don’t have to go in.

This will likely be the response and many will not go in and patronize an establishment that willingly keeps databases of its clientele’s fingerprints.

“It will help keep out the underage and the undesirables.”

Ah, yes, let’s not use our brains to keep out the young ones. This is more for keeping out the riff-raff in our ever-so-exclusive club. We don’t want any chavs drinking with us. In addition to taking fingerprints, staff are also taking photographs of those who enter the bar. This should be enough for many people to simply walk away.

Paul Hopkinson, 32, a regular at Noir Bar, was asked to provide a fingerprint a fortnight ago and refused.

He said: “I was quite angry at the fact that without committing a crime, I was asked to give incredibly personal information like that.

“I don’t even have to give my fingerprints when I leave the country. It worried me about why such a night club, in such an affluent area, would have to go to such extremes for people to gain entry.

It’s hard to say if others will take the steps that Mr. Hopkinson did, but, if you value your privacy, you’ll think twice about giving up this type of personal information when you do not have a clue about how it is going to be stored or used. If you are not a criminal, then this information should never be collected.

The Tupelo school district is considering the use of fingerprint scanners for breakfast and lunch in what they say will make lines move faster, be more accurate, and give students more time to eat. In hyping up the uses of fingerprint scanners, the same tired arguments are being retread as reasons for the use of scanners. If approved, the machines would replace the current system, which uses identification numbers of students.

Lynne Rogers, the Tupelo Public School District’s director of food services, made a presentation about the new technology to the school board last week. She said the machines would neither take nor store fingerprints of students. Instead, they would scan a student’s finger using several points for identification.

They would be most helpful during breakfast at the elementary schools, Rogers said. Although middle- and high-school students are generally able to remember their identification numbers, Rogers said, elementary students tend to forget them. Sometimes those students also don’t know their formal names, making it more difficult, and timely, to track them in the database in order to charge their accounts for the meal.

The process is a little easier at lunch, when students come by homeroom, Rogers said, but more difficult at breakfast when they arrive in random order.

First, it only takes a week or two to get to know the students who eat breakfast every single day. Second, you only need to learn the new students each year, thus you do not have a lot of students each year to learn the names of if they forget their identification numbers. Not doing this is simple laziness and inattentiveness to your job.

Second, if your students can’t remember a simple ID number and don’t even know their own names, your school has a lot more problems than getting everyone to remember their ID number.

As someone who has used these systems before, it is not difficult to remember names. Students that eat school lunches do so on a regular basis. It doesn’t take long to remember who eats, even if they come in random order. Students who can’t remember their ID number are also the same students day in and day out. It’s not that they can’t. They won’t. And, as long as you continue to look their information up, they aren’t going to be bothered with learning it.

Parents would be able to opt to not have their children use the finger scan but to instead continue to use their ID number.

Unless you plan on putting these children through a completely different line or making them wait until everyone with a fingerprint scan is finished first, the entire purpose of installing fingerprint scanners will be defeated before the program even begins. You are not going to get shorter lines. You will not have more time to eat. You will, however, have the same problems as before. If a parent opts out and the student doesn’t know their information or refuses to learn it, they’re still going to slow down the lines. Fancy fingerprint scanners aren’t going to change this.

The school board will decide a later date whether or not to use the scanners. Hopefully, they’ll do some research and see that they need better employees and not fancy equipment that will cost $12,350 to install without any real benefits.

No, this is the old Soviet Union, though the KGB would have loved this new machine. Russia is testing a new ATM that has a lie detector built-in. It is hoped that it will be able to prevent fraud.

Consumers with no previous relationship with the bank could talk to the machine to apply for a credit card, with no human intervention required on the bank’s end.

The machine scans a passport, records fingerprints and takes a three-dimensional scan for facial recognition. And it uses voice-analysis software to help assess whether the person is truthfully answering questions that include “Are you employed?” and “At this moment, do you have any other outstanding loans?”

The big bank involved, Sberbank, whose majority owner is the Russian government, said it intended to install the new machines in malls and bank branches around the country eventually, but had not yet scheduled the rollout. Technology consultants say the machines, if they go into commercial use, would be the banking world’s first use of voice analysis in A.T.M.’s.

Although most Russians are used to and expect this kind of intrusiveness from the government, most people in the West will see these machines as a massive invasion of privacy. Indeed. Who would want to give up so much information to a machine?

A prototype of the machine is on display at Sberbank’s Branch of the Future laboratory in a nondescript office building above a Moscow subway station.

The lab bristles with biometric surveillance technology. When a person walks in, a facial-recognition camera takes note, and an artificial voice cheerily greets known customers. Or, more often, it utters a glum, “Hello, you are not registered,” because only a few of the lab’s staff members have had their faces scanned so far.

Sberbank says that to comply with the part of the privacy law that would prohibit a company from keeping a database of customers’ voice signatures, the bank plans to store customers’ voice prints on chips contained in their credit cards.

Oy vey! What kind of person so readily gives up so many biometric identifiers? In one fail swoop, it gets your passport information, fingerprints, facial scan, voice and video samples, credit card information, and banking information. No thank you.

Researchers at the University of Abertay Dundee and the Scottish Police Services Authority have been able to devise a method for lifting fingerprints from articles of clothing.

Refining an existing technique that’s been used to successfully recover print detail from smooth objects such as glass and plastic, forensic scientists have managed to create a kind of photo negative of fingerprint impressions on fabric. It’s a bit hit and miss at the moment, but even when clear ridge detail isn’t retrieved, the technique could still prove useful to investigators looking for other evidence.

The researchers used a method known as vacuum metal deposition that’s already been used to recover print detail on smooth surfaces like carrier bags, plastics and glass since the 1970s, but has not previously been applied to fingerprint detection on fabrics.

The fabric is placed in a vacuum chamber. Gold is heated and evaporated and spread in a fine layer over the fabric. Heated zinc is then applied, which attaches to the gold layer where the fabric has no fingerprints, leaving the original fabric to show through where contact has been made.

The success rate for recovery is still quite low, with only around 20 percent of the public said to consistently leave good ridge detail or indicate target areas for DNA collection due to the presence of sweat. Folks who have drier skin prove to be poor donors, but the technique could still lead investigators to target areas of clothing for DNA procurement and may reveal other useful facts, such as the shape of a hand or an indication of whether a victim was pushed or grabbed.

What you end up with is a type of photographic negative. Research is still in the early stages so expect more news on the matter as the researchers refine their technique.

Peoria, Arizona is pursuing the idea of forcing customers to give up their fingerprints in order to get some medicines labeled as likely to be abused and involved in cases of fraud.

Peoria law-enforcement officials this month proposed an ordinance that would require anyone filling prescriptions for drugs such as OxyContin and Percocet to show ID and be fingerprinted at the pharmacy counter, including anyone picking up a prescription for a family member or friend.

Dan Pochoda, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, called it an “overreaction.”

Indeed it is a huge overreaction and an invasion of privacy. There are many people who take certain drugs on a regular basis and do not want to be in some database simply because they might need this medicine to live.

Pochoda of the ACLU said that to collect fingerprints of everyone filling a prescription is “like saying we’ll take a blood sample of every person, and later if they are a suspect we’ll use it.”

Details of the plan will be presented to Arizona State Board of Pharmacy in January. Currently, the state tracks certain prescriptions in an effort to track “doctor shoppers” and abuse drugs such as those containing pseudoephedrine.

Peoria City Attorney Steve Kemp is pushing for the measure to be made into law. While prescription fraud cases have increased in the city of Peoria, it is still relatively small compared to legitimate prescriptions. It is also not understood how the data will be collected or stored. What drugs would be on the list requiring fingerprints has also not been released.

Medical privacy would also be of concern. How would HIPAA laws be protected? Will the fingerprint database be connected to other pharmacies. Will it simply be added to the current criminal database? If there are two databases, who would be authorized to have access to it? If something like this were made a law, your fingerprints would likely be accessible to police, pharmacies, doctor’s offices, and insurance companies.

This proposed ordinance would be a huge infringement of individual rights. It will not have the desired effect that government officials are hoping for. Those who are going to abuse these drugs will simply drive a few miles down the road and get their prescription filled in another city or simply steal the drugs. It will only affect, and hurt, honest citizens who must take the medications that the city deems to be on their abusive list.

If passed, the city only need to sit back and wait for the first person denied their medication because they refuse to give up their fingerprints to sue after suffering without their medication. Given the fact that most fingerprint scanners are easily fooled, this program is doomed to failure. Hopefully, the city of Peoria realizes this before implementing it.