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3D Biometric Facial Recognition Comes To UK
Roland Piquepaille writes "In the UK, where the recent Queen's speech about national identity cards generated lots of -- mostly negative -- coverage, another potentially invasive technology is being tested with very few criticism. For example, several police departments are now testing a 3D biometric facial recognition software from Aurora, a company based near Northampton. The use of facial recognition 'is rapidly becoming the third forensic science alongside fingerprints and DNA,' according to a police officer who talked to BBC News for 'How your face could open doors.'" (More below.)
"The company claims its software is so sophisticated it can make the distinction between identical twins. And if the civil liberties groups continue to be neutral, this technology could also be deployed in airports or by private companies. Even banks are thinking to put cameras in their ATM machines to identify you. The good thing is that you will not have to remember your PIN. On the other hand, as with every new technology, is it safe for your privacy and is it possible to hack the system? Read more before making your decision."
If this technology is as good as Aurora claims, it can be used to implement a virtual ID card - just scan someone's face, and you can bring up their info from a database, no need for them to carry a piece of plastic around.
Obviously that's a privacy concern - but how can you regulate face recognition? It's fundamentally no different from having a live cop recognize your mug.
The problem with face recognition is that faces change. If you get a black eye from some fist fight, the computer won't recognize you. Children going through puberty can look completely different in a matter of months. What if you're wearing huge-ass sunglasses? What if you grow a beard? Will you not be able to ID yourself if you are wearing an eye-bandage?
--- MS: "Working software is soooo nineties!"
if you're pretty enough...
Seriously, are the cameras going to be set to raise an alert when someone walks down the street that they can't distinguish? Will police occasionally stop you and ask you to remove your stetson so that CCTV can calm down?
How reliable can this be? And if they can scan and recognize a face this effectively in the data, can we reproduce it in latex a la Mission Impossible... well enough to fool the system anyway?
And do we want the government to have this much data on people?
I can certainly answer the last question.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The current Labout government run by T. Blair is generally seen to be scaremonegering over things like terrorism and crime to justify a new raft of draconian measures. Each one of these measures has been a cynical attempt to limit liberty within the UK.
So, Blair is pretty much like the other founders of the "Coalition of the Willing" (George Bush and John Howard). It seems strange that the leaders of the historically "most free" nations are all trampling over liberty now, while the Germans and Eastern European nations complain.
A good point they brought up on Question Time last week, they mentioned the "foolproofness" of ID cards, i think they were as optimistic as assuming a 1% failure rate.
They then went on to totally demolish this relatively high level of success by simply using numbers. There's about 60 million people in the UK, so that's 600,000 people that can be rejected. That sort of failure is just not acceptable for something such as a national ID car scheme.