Slashdot Mirror
World's Largest Biometric Database
An anonymous reader writes "In the last two years, over 200 million Indian nationals have had their fingerprints and photographs taken and irises scanned, and given a unique 12-digit number that should identify them everywhere and to everyone. This is only the beginning, and the goal is to do the same with the entire population (1.2 billion), so that poorer Indians can finally prove their existence and identity when needed for getting documents, getting help from the government, and opening bank and other accounts. This immense task needs a database that can contain over 12 billion fingerprints, 1.2 billion photographs, and 2.4 billion iris scans, can be queried from diverse devices connected to the Internet, and can return accurate results in an extremely short time."
Your social security number just won't cut it in the future.
How long before someone does something insanely stupid and allows access to this DB posting all of its information on Pastebin? Well I for one will begin working on security platform for this and I will call it DIPSHIT "Deployable Indian Protection Services for Holistical Information Technology"
sil at infiltrated dot net
"...can return accurate results in an extremely short time."
My 25 year old dBASE application also needs only a fraction of a second to retrieve a record from hundreds of millions of records.
It's called an Index. Any database can do it, it's not rocket science.
12 Billion finger prints? That would make sense that the lean efficient government of India decides that a single finger print, or even five fingers are not enough to identify you, but instead all 10 fingers must be identified and stored. That way they can be 10 times sure that your finger print belongs to you. Same with the iris scans, lets scan two eyes across 1.2 billion people instead of just one.
With the decreasing hard drive prices, I'm truly surprised I didn't see 12 billion toe prints!
Wired had an article running about it already last year http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/08/ff_indiaid/all/1.
That can only go wrong.
When the system breaks, at least getting connected to tech support in India won't seem like such a bad thing...
I can only hope that they have to call a customer support number, be given a case ID number on a crap VOIP connection by someone that doesn't speak their language natively well enough to communicate.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/28/3046726/iris-patterns-change-over-time-research
"The biometric iris recognition scans used at many security checkpoints may be less reliable than previously believed, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have found. "
That half a percentage point still gives 6 million possibles I would expect to see a few more 9's tacked on after the decimal point to make it usably accurate.
For those who are interested to know more, here is their quite detailed website http://uidai.gov.in/ More than anything else, it conveys the logistical and bureaucratical complexity of executing a project of this dimension across a country like India.
They'll run out in a few centuries, and then what?
Next time, go hexadecimal from the start.
I work for one of the venders that does the back end searching of the biometrics. It is a very complex project thats for sure.
Where does India outsource /their/ IT jobs for managing things like this database?
India is a messed up 3rd world country with too much corruption and too much of losses to the middlemen. For example, discounted food supplies sent to the poorer sections of the society are misappropriated by the distribution stores. Very small percentage of the poorer population has bank accounts or even an identity card of any sort, or often times even a birth certificate. ( so think of trying to do something in the US without a state id.. or ssn!)
Yes there is a chance that this will get hacked - but this has to be weighed against the good that this will do. The govt plans to create bank accounts directly from these user-ids and directly wire them money, or use it to give out benefits etc. A huge huge deal for a large country with no real social network in place!
What if you get severely burned and then have no irises, fingerprints, and your face looks different? They should be incorporating DNA too.
There is no such thing as corruption in India. So I am sure the system is completely secure.
Microsoft Access '98 -- BOOM, problem solved
The original goatse was a lot more fun.
Erm, the United States. We're the world leaders in the manufacture of sophisticated mass-surveillance and tracking technology.
And have been since 1939! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II#Germany
MS Access?
India has a very high illiteracy rate. Maybe they should tattoo each individual's number on their body, to ensure that it's easy to recall...
Well you are in India mind you - not USA where everyone's waiting with bated breath to help you live as a vegetable or in the ICU.
If you are in a blame bad enough to take off your irises and fingerprints, in India, you would be dead, and then cremated or buried. As long as no one else can duplicate your iris and come to the office, we wont be sending you the monthly $30 check.
Biometrics are not just fingerprints: Apple's Siri and whatever imitation was made available for Android do one thing very well: they export a pristine, digital quality voiceprint with owner details to the US every time they are used.
It's the second largest successful intelligence intercept ever - the first one being WhatsApp and iMessage tapping what was formerly harder-to-get SMS traffic..
Insert
Seems to be the way things are going - Total Global Fascism
1200 million encrypted dbase files on a p2p network?
Taken from the "12 billion fingerprints, 1.2 billion photographs, and 2.4 billion iris scans" quote. I wonder how they came-up with that ratio, and how many months the government committee spent discussing it.
Because why bother with the lower castes
Yes, Andromeda.. This biometric Db will really come in handy when we get slammed with that galaxy.
India has one of the largest populaces for extra fingers and toes. I vote that they make it a dynamic database, with L1-M and R1-N for the designators. Also, with the number of Indians that are barefoot 24/7, they might as well also do foot prints.
I am from India and had my scanning done a week back. The software seemed to be a qt hackjob loaded on multiple ubuntu laptops. The photo came out funny but the 10 finger and iris scans were detailed enough to make me feel uneasy. Not to mention the fact that every piece of identification from graduation certificates to driving licenses to bank account numbers are linked to this single database. Bah.. Its India.. who cares for data privacy here...
It was recently reported that Irises actually change over time. This begs the question of how accurate this data will be in 5 years? 10 years?
Yes, but all these technologies have error rates that increase over time as your body changes. Even a small 0.3% x 10^9 is a lot of errors to deal with and correct. In the mean time, the citizen will be stuck because the computer will be seen as infallible.