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."
Wired had an article running about it already last year http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/08/ff_indiaid/all/1.
When the system breaks, at least getting connected to tech support in India won't seem like such a bad thing...
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.
Plus when they start finding duplicate fingerprints, they're going to need to check more than one finger.
This is a good idea in a way because it should resolve the question of how common fingerprint matches really are.
They'll run out in a few centuries, and then what?
Next time, go hexadecimal from the start.
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!
Iris scanning actually works in a way similar to a hash. You take the iris picture and find a 2048-bit number, the "IrisCode" or wherever you wanna call it. If you want to make a comparison, then you find the IrisCode for the other picture, and compute the Hamming distance between two. The threshold for match or no-match is actually a function of the database size. (I read the paper a while ago and I'm probably made a few mistakes describing it, but it works along those lines). John Daugman site has more details.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
This is a good idea in a way because it should resolve the question of how common fingerprint matches really are.
This is the best piece of text Slashdot had to offer in quite a while. High five, insightful internet person!
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Where does India outsource /their/ IT jobs for managing things like this database?
Erm, the United States. We're the world leaders in the manufacture of sophisticated mass-surveillance and tracking technology. It's our other major export besides financial know-how, bombs, and working-class misery. The NSA is building a data center right now to track every packet of data sent within the borders of this country. And we don't just store biometric hashes -- W're taking complete, high-resolution imagery of our citizens bodies and keeping them on file. The kind of surveillance and tracking we do on our own citizens make this look like a high school science project.
There's no reason to think we wouldn't happily help the corporation of India... er, I mean, the country of India (sorry, I'm American.. it's hard to keep corporations and governments separate).
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I already have this service, although it's not the government.
What if you get severely burned and then have no irises, fingerprints, and your face looks different? They should be incorporating DNA too.
When has that ever stopped them before?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
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...