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Have Your Fingerprints Read From 6 Meters Away
First time accepted submitter Burdell writes "A new startup has technology to read fingerprints from up to 6 meters away. IDair currently sells to the military, but they are beta testing it with a chain of 24-hour fitness centers that want to restrict sharing of access cards. IDair also wants to sell this to retail stores and credit card companies as a replacement for physical cards. Lee Tien from the EFF notes that the security of such fingerprint databases is a privacy concern."
Since the last time this technology was mentioned more than a year ago, it seems that the claimed range for reading has tripled, and the fingerprint reader business has been spun off from the company at which development started.
So are we going back to the habit of wearing silk gloves all the time now? I wouldn't mind that.
If a gym, retail store, or credit card company ask for my finger prints, they will get told in no uncertain terms to politely go fsck themselves.
Not happening.
If you aint law enforcement, don't even bother asking.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think we've just eliminated fingerprints as a viable identification method.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I don't think perfect identification, be it biometric, technological, or other, is in any way a good thing.
There are perfectly valid reasons for needing or wanting aliases, which are not associated with being a criminal.
Take for instance, employees of a collections agency. These are people who perform a distasteful, but still required service. Nobody really likes being called by a bill collector, nor do they like having to use one to get deadbeat clients to pay up. Deadbeats especially, despise bill collectors, and some are even belligerent enough to be a real physical threat to collection employees. This is why many collections agencies provide work aliases for call center staff, etc. If a foolproof means of identifying people is developed, these employees are at risk.
Then you have the quintessential witness protection program. These are people that have witnessed a violent or serious crime, and are now embroiled through no fault of their own in some serious shit. If Big Tony can perfectly identify them through his ring of heavies using foolproof tech, this program becomes effectively worthless.
and last, but certainly far from least, you have the serious problems with the Feds, and their "Papers Please!" abuses. History does a fine job of explaining, in graphic, nightmare inducing detail, exactly why perfectly being identifiable by government officials is bad bad juju.
People making startups, and companies offering products:
I understand that there is a very strong demand for this kind of technology. Please also understand exactly *why* there is a demand for this kind of technology, and what it opens the door to. Is landing a fat contract and making bank worth endangering people's lives, and being directly complicit in abuses of power that very well inevitably kill people really worth it?
I personally dont think it is.
This kind of technology, in the broad and general sense, is not a good thing. Please stop developing it.
There are several problems with this technology most importantly how it will be used.
#1.) Cops will use it like minority report. WOOO we know where you are
#2.) This leads to number 2. Computers are not really used to perform fingerprint analysis. Yes, they can shorten the list but, in the end, its always a human who decides if its a "match"
#3.) There is no standard protocol for deciding if two fingerprints match. It is completely subjective. The IAI has flat out said they won't create a protocol because its not possible
#4.) There is no predictable margin of error. Frankly with no protocol and 100% subjective human interpretation, there is no way to quantify the probability of a match or more importantly, the margin of error.....heck, fingerprint analysts have been shown to make different identification to the same prints on different days and in different context.
#4) fingerprint analysis operates on the assumption that all fingerprints are unique (or unique within a reasonable margin of error). There has never been any evidence to support this assumption. Even the FBI with probably the worlds largest fingerprint database has never published any data suggesting finger prints are unique.
This all leads to the worst part. Law Enforcement will put this in an automated system to read our prints around town and assume its good enough to harass, arrest and convict citizens.
I don't like where this is going.
Dont get me wrong, its cool tech. Its just going to make a mess of things
After a little RTFA time, I don't think it's quite like the blurb makes it sound. The system can't scan dozens of people walking down a sidewalk (unlike the facial recognition technology used in most "free" countries today). The user has to actively wave at it to allow it to scan.
One concern the article raised is that it appears the prints are stored on the machine as an image (or perhaps a series of numbers describing the layout) rather than a cryptographically secure hash of the print. So if you steal the system, you get a bunch of free pictures of people's prints...and you probably get all of the prints on the hand, since they would likely scan every digit and compare it to the database. As prints become a more common means of identification, those boxes become as valuable as credit card and SSN databases. Although I'm sure the security of 24-hour Fitness and Target are second to none.
I don't know about fingerprints at 6 meters away, but if they come up with a miniature portable through the clothes scanner (ALA TSA) that can scan people from 6 meters away, I'll be happy to take it through a chain of 24-hour fitness centers to beta test it for them.