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Public Iris Scanning Device In the Works
Nonfinity writes "A public iris scanning device has been proposed in a patent application from Sarnoff Labs in New Jersey. The device is able to scan the iris of the eye without the knowledge or consent of the person being scanned. The device uses multiple cameras, captures multiple images, and then selects the best image to process."
Damnit, someone watched Minority Report and went "Heeeeey, good idea....GET ME R&D"
Put on your tin foil hat... And sun glasses!
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Interesting to note that the article focusses on the less sinister uses for this, customised advertising, whilst bypassing any mention of privacy aside from a nod to saying it could take place "without the knowledge or participation of the subject". So whose money will talk fastest, advertisers or Homeland Security?
Wear some mirrored sunglasses.
An excuse to wear shades in a cinema. It's the 80's all over again!
Task Mangler
Reduce, reuse, cycle
In all seriousness, I would've thought someone in London would come up with this idea first.
Blerg.
Do we know that repeated retina scanning is healthy for our eyes?
...sales of mirror sunglasses skyrocket!
Contact lenses that alter eye color are already in popular, widespread use.
How hard would it be to construct a contact lens with a unique, fake, computer-generated iris image (no idea how you'd do that, but "fractals" sounds like a good buzzword to insert here)? Sound like it would be a lot easier than fake fingerprints.
In a situation where you knew you were being scanned, the officials might say "I see you're wearing contacts, remove them please," but I don't quite see an airport saying "no contact lenses allowed in this airport..." particular if the idea is that the scanning is supposed to be surreptitious.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
specifically about implementing something this.
Identifying who you scanned. sure you can scan an iris without their knowledge but unless you have the pattern stored how will you know who it is? Perhaps do it at a register and match it to the card/id used? That would be underhanded to say the least.
Storage, how much space per pattern? What is the speed of comparison to a large database? Something that is quick enough to focus ads (for the minority report fans) would require serious processing power.
I could see it in small settings, say a business who needs a less instrusive means of security. Scan all your employees and only let them in, if accompanied by those who cannot be matched then don't admit to sensitive areas. However in the general public setting, costs for equipment to store millions of scans and process them fast enough to be meaningful is still aways off.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
...mirrored sunglasses are back in style.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Patent applications propose a lot of things (claims) in the hopes that, someday during the life of the patent, if the technology is finally evolved that far, the assignee can make $$$ off of licensing.
I'd really like to see a system capable of the kind of detail, precision, speed, and tracking required for covert iris analysis, in real time, from a distance.
LSS: just because it's in a claim doesn't mean it'll ever happen - the name of the game is to add as many related claims as possible to cover all possible future concepts and variations.
And, then, there're always 'mirror shades', contacts, and corneal lenses if you're really trying to beat the system.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
I've never seen such pessimistic claims for iris recognition. With a false accept rate of 1/1000 to 1/10000, you can achieve a false accept rate of pretty much zero. I respect Simon Davies, but I'm not sure he has his facts right here.
Xenu loves you!
The article says "Good quality scans result in a 'false match' less than one time per one hundred billion."
It also says "the newly proposed system is that it allows iris scans to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject."
What it does not say is that "the newly proposed system allows good quality scans, with a 'false match' of less than one time per one hundred billion, to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject." I fancy readers are supposed to infer that conclusion, which does not follow from the premises.
I'll bet the system has the usual impressive-sounding "99.9%" accuracy or something in that ballpark... like all those facial-recognition systems. Meaning a false positive rate of one in a thousand. Meaning that if one in a million airport visitors is a known terrorist with an iris scan in the database, then 999 out of every thousand people, yanked out of the concourse by polite but firm security officials, will be Lutheran grandmothers from Davenport, Iowa travelling to visit their children in St. Paul.
And the officials will be unable to give any coherent explanation, since the system is supposed to be surreptitions.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I don't know about the rest of you, but iris scanners scare the crap out of me. Every time I look into the peephole to get scanned, I'm relatively certain a large needle will shoot out from behind the glass and stab me in the eye.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
I am getting me some of these contacts
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
...is not so much that this is possible, but that the inventors seem to feel sure that there's a market in this AND that there won't be any serious objection to stop it. A bit like the proliferation of "security" (read "unadulterated snooping") cameras in London.
Actually, thinking about it, what *really* worries me is that people *won't* object to it. Not really.
Ah! Brave new world... etc.
...dark ones
I'm a patent examiner and unfortunately the ap (only at first glance) looks pretty solid. I never like to see a technology that exploits people as it's main purpose but this branch of government won't be able to stop it. The good news is at the current time it appears the implementation is cost-prohibitive so it won't be implemented for a number of years in mass. I hope when this technology is implemented there are some restrictions put on it. Invasion of privacy is a big and growing problem.
The original generic sig.
The system had a problem with people who blinked too much. I had to sit in front of the camera and remain still and it took a picture of my eye a few times before it got a good enough image. Out of 5 people who participated, all but one had to have multiple pictures taken.
I just can't see this system being used with cameras that randomly take pictures from varying distances and work, unless the cameras and software improved quite a bit in the past two years.
I want to see you try that. Chances are they'll just gun you down and not bother to
arrest you. People have tried in the past and failed miserably. To get through a
checkpoint you'd have to _be_ the guy you're trying to impersonate and I don't
mean just fake iris contact lense and fake thumbprints. You'd have to pass
biometric face recognition, voice recogntion and then you'd still have to have
the same body shape if they got see-through infrared imaging. Oh and at the newer
checkpoints downtown they would still bust you because there they have computers
that look for the way you walk and move and they do genetic spot checks there.
Please contact lionsgate films /horror division immediately..
btw FYOU~! now I'm gonna have that same vision every time...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Knew it all along. Time to get me a 'poon or a pizza delivery job..oh and a samurai sword too.
Nothing witty
It's not the style or coolness that makes people wear mirrorshades in the 2020s. It's the attempt to stay unscanned and undetected.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Which terrorist group will detonate our beloved freedom fighters with this first?
"and when I gave them cell phones, they could not get enough...
generating the database is simple, just use the network of driver's license ID cameras.
the only good news is the economics of technology mean this will be first used by high-value targets against other high-value targets. Think large-scale corporate wars vs. vengeful government agencies...with the rest of us as collateral damage.
and- which foreign state will get access to our database first?
on the other hand, think of how many more dead soldiers we will be able to recognize on the battle field! yay!
I don't know about contacts, but my glasses must do wonders for light path - astigmatism corrections (different on each eye) AND progressive bifocals AND distance corrections (different on each eye). Gotta remember to keep them pushed up the bridge of my nose, I guess.
Oh, and they're coated so as to reduce UV.
people are wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day :)
I think I'll just start wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. According to reputable sources, they seem to make retinal scanning impossible...
Unless the system takes advantage of people that are in close proximity to the camera to get its pictures. Think about the resolution required otherwise. Let's say we have a picture that is 2,048 x 1,536 pixels... now, can you imagine a person's irises taking up more than 1% of the width of the picture, unless it were a rather close "headshot" type pose? Now, take a look at some closeup shots of human irises. How much information do you think you'll get from 20 x 15 pixels?
Now, instead of 3 megapixels, think 12. That's still only 40 x 30 pixels. Not enough.
I'll worry when 100 megapixels becomes commonly available. (Yes I know the Navy has a 111 megapixel CCD).
I foresee a new market developing for iris-concealing contact lenses.
The constant monitoring, surveillance, identification, numbering and tagging of people in our society is an affront to human dignity. It's an affront not only to those being numbered and tagged, though they are the ones most offended, it's also a stain on the dignity of any state that permits it. Anyone who disagrees should ask people who have been tagged, with a barcode.
But the interesting fact is, human dignity is not a universally recognised right. We've got rights to our property, lives and liberty, but not in most cases to our dignity. This is only something that has recently been awknowladged.
The word "dignity" dows not even appear in the US constitution(enacted 1787). US citizens do not have a constitutional right to it. The Irish constitution(enacted 1937) does mention in the preamble that it is being adopted in part "...so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured". But this is only in the preamble.
Interestingly, the constitution of South Africa (enacted 1996), explicitly and unabiguously guarantees a right to dignity in Chapter 2: Section 10: I guess decades of having their dignity denied to them taught South Africans that this right doesn't really go without saying. This is one ammendment I would dearly love to see in my country's constitution. (Actually the SA constitution also guarantees the right to privacy and even the right to private communications. It's an extremely progressive document which unfortunately hasn't influenced older constitutions in the way that it should.)
Privacy in public is obviously a fallacy. But we should at least not have to suffer affronts to our dignity by being scanned and checked at every turn, or have our clothing seen through at every security checkpoint. Laws forcing Jews to wear stars or Muslims to wear crescents would probably still be constitutional in a lot of countries. A dignity ammendment would make what we know is wrong explicitly wrong. Humans aren't like animals. We have more needs than simply life, liberty and property. Dignity is one of those other needs.
May the Maths Be with you!
Current systems only have a name in the database.
What makes you think that the new system will have pictures, a name and a text description when the current system only has one of them?
Man lighten up. I for one, welcome our iris-scanning camera overlords.
Say the police uses this. OMG they catch criminals easier. This isn't some freaking sinister plot to spy on you while you watch pr0n or something. If you have these ridiculous notions that the police/government shouldn't even freaking know you exist, don't come whining next time there's a huge hole in the road, or your son can't go to school cause it costs $2 million / year. Hell, don't even expect the military to do anything if someone tries to invade/bomb/whatever us.
You say we need a "right to dignity." I say, they need a right to protect and advance.
I don't want anyone scanning my pubes.
Oh, it says public...
Never mind!
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Mirrorshades
Putting a "right to dignity" in your constitution is either:
a) A sign that the constitution will be applied in a very limited fashion, I.e. more as a nice-sounding statement of intent with very limited legal day-to-day application. I suspect this is the case in South Africa.
b) A legal train-wreck waiting to happen. Applying a legal concept of "a right to dignity" in practice makes many other infamous slippery legal issues seem easy by comparison. Expect a constantly changing (according to legal and political fashions) defintion of "dignity". What is certain is only that many new, cool "constitutional" concepts will emerge from the penumbra of dignity.
Why? Simply because there is hardly any consensus whatsoever as to what "dignity" means in many relevant situations - it's fuzzy beyond belief. I recently visited London for a few days, and was no doubt recorded by hundreds of CCTV cameras. Did I consider it a blow to my dignity? Not really. To you on the other hand, CCTV recordings appear to constitute a severe blow to your dignity. Which sort of illustrates my point.
A friend was "sweating out his PhD" in a lab which contained a cool computer-driven laser-etching device. He and a friend hatched a drunken plan to etch parallel lines into a pair of contact lenses, creating a nice one-way mirror effect. No idea if they ever managed it (presumably not), but I wonder if they filed a patent on the idea...
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
John Anderton! I could stich a dead cat to your chest and you wouldnt even get a cold
The problem is that privacy, dignity, and all of that only apply to what the government can or cannot do. Same with free speech.
It doesn't say anything about corporations taking all the information they can, including surreptitious iris scans that pop advertisements. For that you need Congress to pass better consumer protection laws, and unless you live in California (where they go overboard with it), good luck with that.
Clones are people two.
The worse problem, when you think about it, is the number of persons that are going to be scanned.
E.g., let's say you stick this in an airport, and give it an insane resolution camera. You want to identify suspects quickly in a crowd, right? So if this thing is this good at scanning people without even having them look in a gizmo, better batch scan any iris that has enough pixels on that camera, right?
The problem there is that there'll be maybe a thousand people in any place in the airport at a time, so around 10 of them will be falsely identified. That's just in one scanning everyone in the room.
Now think the hundreds of thousands of people moved by a reasonable airport daily, their families coming with them to the airport, etc. Oooer. Now that's some serious false positives.
Multiply this by a a generous number of cameras scattered all over the place. A 1 false match in 100 scans pretty much means just that: if you take the same person and walk him past 100 cameras, on the average 1 of them will identify him as someone else. Stick enough of these cameras on an airport, and everyone will get at least one false match by just walking from one gate to another, maybe with a detour to the toilet/bar/whatever.
And I don't even want to think of the janitors, security guards, airline personnel, etc. Those are going to get scanned again and again thousands of times a day, producing anywhere between tens and hundreds of false matches each.
Basically: think of the worst "the Pope, Bush and Osama walk onto a plane" joke and a camera somewhere will produce exactly that kind of false match. Daily.
Now for the second problem: picture being placed somewhere at the scene of a crime by such a false match. 99% accuracy sounds just about guaranteed to have been you to the average jurror.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
-b.
Remember how a biometrically secure car cause its owner to lose his finger?[1] This is exactly the kind of thing going to happen if these idiots started to make iris scanner for public use.
t m
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4396831.s
http://www.sarnoff.com/products_services/governmen t_solutions/homeland_security/iris.asp
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
That either block or interfere with such a scan.
Damn, what can we use that is transparent instead of the standard tin foil?
Mirrored sunglasses right on the eyeball....this should keep them from reading your iris or other eye data, eh? That and it just looks cool.
I know chicks hate it when you have mirror shades on at the beach, etc (I can't tell where his eyes are looking). I wonder how bad they'd hate these?
A side effect...no more red eye on those flash pictures...I guess we'd all reflect the flash like dogs do?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
in these:
. html
http://www.thinkythings.org/LegGodt/funny-glasses
This is not the sig you're looking for.
I wonder if I should invest in some sunglass maker that specifically prevents cameras from taking pictures of your eyes...
Let's just hope that Osama isn't an organ donor.
I've never seen such pessimistic claims for iris recognition. With a false accept rate of 1/1000 to 1/10000, you can achieve a false accept rate of pretty much zero. I respect Simon Davies, but I'm not sure he has his facts right here.
Actually the only place RTFA gives a rate of false positives is where it says "Good quality scans result in a 'false match' less than one time per one hundred billion (this system has been used with excellent results in the United Arab Emirates)." I'd say that's pretty good accuracy and makes tracking citizens, er suspects and terrorists, pretty easy with enough scanners.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's not about privacy. It's about human dignity.
The constant monitoring, surveillance, identification, numbering and tagging of people in our society is an affront to human dignity. It's an affront not only to those being numbered and tagged, though they are the ones most offended, it's also a stain on the dignity of any state that permits it. Anyone who disagrees should ask people who have been tagged, with a barcode.
But the interesting fact is, human dignity is not a universally recognised right.
Since when did you ever think dignity was a right? You only have as much dignity as you think that you have. If I'm standing by you in the train, I don't lessen your dignity just because you are being looked at. You only have a very vague right to privacy. Anything that you emit sight, sound or smell is public information that others can and will pick up. We've not had recording tech long at all. This will change us.
I think this could be fun tech. Think the Marauder's Map from Harry Potter. I could see this being used in public schools to keep known sex offenders off school property. First take a map of building/property that you want protected, then estimate and mount up the needed cameras at all enterance/exits and around the outside of the property, then update your school/staff ID card process to record a good scan of every authorized student/staff/teacher that is allowed on the school. You could use this system so that attendance is taken for each class as well stick a few camera inside the class rooms for that purpose. Now you could know exactly when and where everyone is in the building or on the property at any given time. Next you need to attempt to map parents or authorized pick personnel to selected students. Only this person or group of people are allowed to pick up this student. If a student gets on the wrong buss or gets into an unauthorized friend's car or a non-authorized staff/teacher's car the system could flag it and e-mail an alert messages to the student, the student's teacher, the teacher's supervisor, and the student's parents. If the student ends up kidnapped, it should be trival exporting all information of who was recorded in the car by the system, surrounding students, parent and teacher witnesses to the event.
Any one not in the system would by default be unauthorized personnel. If you wanted to keep out just sex offenders though, you would have to attempt to get valid information for your system from your state that could be tricky.
Stores like Walmart could use this for loss prevention or just IDing those that walked through the entrance. The store could follow the movements of everyone inside and if you ever make a check or credit card purchase map that a blame they could know exactly how you browse their store. They attempt to group families or just groups of shoppers/browsers. If pair parents, and 3 kids show up they'd track individual movements and link everyone up as possible family unit. I don't know how useful the software guessing at the groupings would be. A single store wouldn't have much data. Say Walmart did it across all its stores though. They could in theory track the same iris pattern through out everyone of their stores. Say they started tracking my kids in the buggy or walking allong with the parents, but they've never had any personal information on who those two kids are other than the same two parents show up. They could in theory track and tie all your cash, credit, and check purchases together. Say my kids only have an allowance or birthday cash and only have $40 cash to spend before they get a job at 16-18. Somewhere at 16-18, they could open a checking account or get a debit card. Using either of those forms of payment the store could tie back all those cash purchases and all your just browsing history to a name, payment account, and maybe an address and phone number as well.
I'd love to actually know all this information for myself. Stores would love to know this information to better design their internal store layout and move frequently purchased together products together. Think Amazon suggested purchases except at Walmart on the shelf.
...sunglasses! Big Brother can't make you not wear sunglasses when you're out in public. So much for catching those pesky terrorists by looking at their irises!
That's great 'til the Necromongers come looking for the last Furian.
We are all just people.
...I wear my sunglasses at night...
You have to remember that technology isn't composed just of the enthusiastic nerds developping it, but also of the morally-challenged marketeers selling half-baked technologies as the solution to all world's problems and then some. The nerd working on the recognition algorithm may well be aware of the limitations and need for improvement, but that doesn't ever stop the marketting team from selling something that's not even half-ready for RL use.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
OK, who's taking bets? How long until someone has their eyeball stolen so a criminal can try and break into a building with it?
...is that privacy is officially dead for the common man, alongside celebrities. Gradually the principle that being left alone is a basic right has been slowly disregarded. Obviously, it would happen to the high-profile characters first (evidence for which includes various tabloids and the TV Guide Channel's coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith tragedy-of-the-century media event). However, especially with the rise of technology which makes it easy to create, store, and share information, people take the raw power and run with it without considering the consequences -- or with direct intentions for its use, which is even worse.
Records are stored about us from birth -- a birth certificate quickly proceeds to a billion "quick surveys" as to what baby food we prefer; then our academic records and MySpace accounts as teenagers and young adults; financial information and buying habits as we enter the workforce; and so on. There have even been debates as of late as to whether insurance coverage should be determined by the genetic fitness of a client. I hate to make the comparison due to the cliché, but we really are in the Matrix, being fed upon by marketing companies and marketing companies' suppliers galore without gaining anything in return (except the golden opportunity to own or play a minorly, critically important part in Next Big Thing 2.0).
Though we can't stop the march of technology, there need to be trustable non-profit lobbying groups dedicated to at least turning the march in the proper direction -- to benefit the consumer, to provide safety and a level of appealing innovation, without invading the sanctitiy of our homes, our lives, and even our bodies. The government has quickly proven that it alone definitely cannot be trusted to look after the citizens' best interests in this and other matters, especially when they're interested in the spying tech themselves.
Constantly staring at me from afar is still stalking, and it should be recognized and punished as such. As for I, I feel like putting up more curtains, and wearing sunglasses when I go out. No man is an island, but that doesn't mean he should let anyone in his domain to peek under the bed or search in his cabinets to gather ideas about what to charge him for.
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.