People tend to think that digital copies of our biological features, stored in a government-run database, are problems of a dystopian future. But governments around the world are already using such technologies. Severalcountries are collecting massive amounts of biometric data for their national identity and passport schemes—a development that raises significant civil liberties and privacy concerns. Biometric identifiers are inherently sensitive data. As European privacy watchdogs have said, biometrics changes irrevocably the relationship between body and identity, because they make the characteristics of the human body “machine-readable” and subject to further use. This is why such identification schemes become particularly dangerous when used with unreliable biometric technologies that can misidentify individuals.
Regulators in several jurisdictions continue to romanticize the security and accuracy of face, fingerprint, and iris automatic recognition biometric technologies. But the existence of a significant amount of falsified biometric identification documents raisesquestions as to whether these technologies are toounreliable to prevent fraud, thus providing individuals and governments with a false sense of security.
Automatic Face Recognition in Border Control
Biometric data of individuals’ faces has been used since 2007 at various European border checks. Eleven airports in the UnitedKingdom now have e-passport gates that scan EU travelers’ faces and compare them to measurementsoftheirfacialfeatures (i.e. biometrics), stored on a chip in their biometric passports. Although error rates of state-of-the-art facial recognition technologies have been reduced over the past 20 years, these technologies still cannot identify individuals with complete accuracy. In an incidentin 2011, the Manchester e-passport gates let through a couple that had mixed up their passports. The UK Border Agency subsequently disabled the Manchester gates and launched an investigation.
Similare–passportgates have been introduced in Australia and New Zealand. During the early stages of testing in Australia, the technology showed a six to eight percent error rate. Moreover, this technology also misidentified two men who exchanged passports. Nevertheless, the government refused to disclose the final error rates, citing security concerns.
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“But the existence of a significant amount of falsified biometric identification documents raises questions as to whether these technologies are too unreliable to prevent fraud, thus providing individuals and governments with a false sense of security.”
The issue isn’t about reliability, it’s about whether we (the people) want this type of biometric technology used at all (by corporations or governments).
Combine biometric identification + targeting weapons and you have a pretty effective machine for eliminating dissent.
Do you really want a computer scraping social networks, profiling you via algorithms, making a decision that you are a ‘problem’ because you have an unpopular (to the current regime) opinion, and then using energy weapons or drones or other automated means to make the problem (you) go away?
This is already in use today, and people better wake up fast that today they target ‘suspected militants’, which is a nice way of saying someone who might fight back against tyranny. That includes you (just not yet here in America…but coming soon to a neighborhood near you).
The whole point of “what you have” forms of authentication has been to train these biometric forms. Credit card, key FOB building access, cell phone. Notice all the cameras going up around you? Stop lights. Buildings? It’s a web of biometrics. Cell phone? Tracks your location. All these are used to identify and confirm YOU. Once the reliability goes up in the biometrics, that’s when they no longer need you do to anything, carry anything, in order to be identified…that’s when the culling will start.