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A Wrinkle For Biometric Systems: Irises Change Over Time
scibri writes "The iris scanners that are used to police immigration in some countries, like the UK, are based on the premise that your irises don't change over your lifetime. But it seems that assumption is wrong. Researchers from the University of Notre Dame have found that irises do indeed change over time, enough so that the failure rate jumps by 153% over three years. While that means a rise from just 1 in 2 million to 2.5 in two million, imagine how that will affect a system like India's — which already has 200 million people enrolled — over 10 years."
One in a million instead of one in two millions. I guess it would still not overload the average office clerk to double check that many people. Yes, it would be a nuisance, but a minor one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not really a fan of biometrics, but I guess we'd have to come up with a better reason than one of statistical insignificance. Likewise you could say inoculations are bad because one in a million develops a rash so let's toss it altogether.
The only thing that I can take from this is that officials should be informed that a negative on a biometric scan is NOT necessarily a proof that the person is not who he claims to be.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I object to the notion that pointless identification by the state like iris prints for immigration only fucks over a tiny percentage of the population. The loss of privacy is a bigger concern for me, and I've never had iris scans, to my knowledge.
Iris scanning is NOT used to police immigration in the UK. It was a failed experiment and people are no longer able to register their eyes. Any idiot passing through immigration at Heathrow or Gatwick could see it was taking the biometric people longer, even though there was no queue.
I think they could have a much larger problem. Since a diabetics eyes can change drastically in a 2-3 month period, and depending on who's data you're using. You're looking at anywhere between 3% and as high as 25% of the average population having a problem with this system.
Om, nomnomnom...
Or with contact lenses. I found this out myself after wearing contacts for a couple of years. After wearing them longer each day than I should have, my eyes began growing extra blood vessels to bring oxygen to the cornea where it was covered by the lens. It most definitely changed the pattern in my irises.
The tolerance is already set so loose that it only fails to approve the person 1 in 1 million times. It isn't the error rate, it's a reflection of the *wide* error tolerances set.
They did the same trick with the facial scanners, they rejected too many people when trialed at UK airports, so they 'recalibrated' them until they rejected only an acceptable number of people. Where 'recalibrate' is really just increasing the error margin till the reject rate is low enough that the last labour government can justify the purchase price.
Here they've set the iris scanner to only reject 1 in a million, and now it has to be set 3 times looser to reject 1/3rd of 1 in a million in order to keep the reject rate low enough so that it will still be that low after 3 years.
Oh, and one little side effect of these biometrics is that now have to get our passports updated every 5 years instead of 10, making any cost saving at the expense of the passport holder.
And yet iris and retena scans are FAR more privacy friendly than fingerprints or DNA.
We don't go around leaving our eye prints all over the place. And it is far more difficult to obtain them clandestinely.