Loss of Privacy

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.

A Polish priest has installed a fingerprint reader in order to track the attendance of children at mass.

The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said.

The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it.

“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina.

Poland is perhaps the most devoutly Roman Catholic country in Europe today and churches are regularly packed on Sundays.

Get them while they’re young. Entice children with the ability to not take an exam for giving up their private, biometric data and they’ll never know what hit them. Just make it easily and they’ll line up like sheep to do whatever you want.