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The UAE Claims To Hold the Worlds Largest Biometric Database
another random user writes "The United Arab Emirates holds the largest biometric database in the world, the Emirates Identity Authority has announced. The population register of Emirates ID has over 103 million digital fingerprints and over 15 million digital facial recognition records, which includes multiple records of each UAE resident, and digital signatures as of October 11, senior officials said. Dr. Ali Al Khoury, Director General of Emirates ID, said the authority has submitted an official application to the World Record Academy to recognize this record. Asked about the confirmation of the authority's claims about the world record, an official spokesman of the authority told Gulf News on Sunday: 'We have made worldwide surveys and inquiries with the similar official authorities and agencies of the world governments holding such databases and confirmed that our database is the largest. The World Record Academy also confirmed to us that no other government or authority has made a similar claim for such a record,' he said."
Ok...this is a bragging rights type thing somehow??
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I am making a meatza tonight
At least they didn't win the world record for most 1984-like regime.
no other government or authority has made a similar claim for such a record
Other governments, that may be sued for doing this, are just not advertising their databases.
But in reality i'd guess the usa or uk was actually the real 'winner' here.
Most likely the usa.. they have data on most of the people in the world plus what they have on their own citizens.
Now the Dept. of Homeland Security will think it is a contest. More rights violations in 3, 2, ...
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I KNEW those amiga fanbois were up to something! All this time their precious UAE was silently gathering damning personal biometric information on their users, hoping to shame them away from PCs running windows, MacOS and Linux!
Wait.. what? United Arab Emerates? Not Ubiqutious Amiga Emulator?
Wait, what? Nothing to do with amiga users at all? Sir, do you know what site this is!? Honestly, what is this world coming to!
[Note for the humor deprived: there has been so much bullshit pertaining to the middle east lately that I felt some humor was warranted. Deal with it.]
But seriously, why would they think that any serious organization that had such a database (like the NSA, for example) would bother registering it with the "The World Record Academy"? A database like that is supposed to be used for something. Simply being the biggest is no more impressive than the biggest ball of twine in the world. I'd be much more interested if it was the fastest, because scanning a database that large for biometric matches is probably not going to be easy.
This "news" just sounds like someone is hungry for attention.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I doubt they have China or the US beat. Hell, I'd venture the Casino's in Macau or Las Vegas even have that beat. They just don't report it because an accolade like a world record in this field is useless and frankly not earning you any high fives from the public either.
It shouldn't be too hard. Get just one digital fingerprint and one facial recognition record, then copy each 105 million times. That should work since by their own counting, multiples count.
At some point the light should go off in everyone's head to see where governments are going with this. It'll probably be too late, but at least we will realize what happened... But then what?
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Much like the record for obesity, per capita incarceration, total number of CCTV cameras, and other such records, this is not necessarily something to be proud of.
Cue the PR people to turn this into a competition of national pride.
How useful are your fingerprints once they've cut your hand off?
Professional athletes, those who've inherited their fortune, and Saudi royalty:
Athletes earned their wealth by virtue of a genetic lottery and countless hours of physical training.
Those who've inherited 'old money' have never struggled in their lives and often live in a bubble.
The Saudi royalty just dug a hole in the ground and discovered a gold mine.
I think somebody just offered to sell them, 'THE WORLD'S LARGEST biometric database' and somebody said sure, I don't have one of those.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statism.
This is not something to be celebrated.
Kind of a dubious distinction. Like having the world record for number of gulags, or something.
Proverbs 21:19
The UAE's native population is vastly outnumbered by imported workers.
There's about 1 million natives and about 7 million foreigners.
A small fraction of those 7 million foreigners are white collar, with the rest being cheap labor
Almost all of the labor force is male and the government was scared shitless the last time the workers got upset and started striking.
It's no surprise that they want to build a database of the immigrant workers.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If this data got in the wrong hands, it could be a HUGE boon to identity theft syndicates. What if UAE undergoes its own "Arab Spring" coup to overthrow the hereditary "Emirs" who run the country? How do we know if all this data they have is secure? How many thousands of fake passports could be made by using this data, giving middle eastern extremists easy access to international travel?
Without wishing to collude in this gigantic one-upmanship-fest...
Total population of UAE is around 8 million (estimate - 2005 census it was actually 4 million).
TFA specifically says the records are UAE residents so we aren't talking about huge numbers of transiting air passengers or tourists.
So - how the hell do these numbers add up? If there are now 102 million fingerprint records, has every resident been digitally fingerprinted 12 times?? If there are 15 million facial records, has every resident in the country been imaged twice on average???
If all this is true, UAE should be commended not for the size of their gigantic database, but for a logistical and planning operation on a par with the holocaust.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
Facebook has them beat by about 1 billion people.
Far more than 32 million foreigners enter the USA every year wiki, and they take digital photos and fingerprints.
Dr. Al Khouri said... the database will contribute to the security and advancement of society, as well as supporting personal identity... on the internet.
As if anyone with a Smarphone isn't already engaged in providing such information to private and governmental databases throughout Western societies. And it's not just the imediacy of your 'identity' that's the target. We're actively engaged in analyzing people's behavioral profiles, not solely as they relate to your trustworthiness as a business risk but as a 'stable' part of society.
I think it's time to update the definition of Civil Engineering.
Run Mr. Anderton, run!!
In Mexico, the IFE (electoral office) has 40 millions fingerprints records with two fingerprints per person, so it's 80M fingerprints. Also the IFE have 90M face mugshot - there is a delta of 50M person with only face mugshot and no fingerprint. EUA as a population of less than 10M persons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Emirates) and they take a tenprint for ID and passport (plus iris - burka situation!), add the foreing resident and workers, you reach the +100M fingerprint (100 fingerprints / 10 fingerprints per person = 10M individual records). The FBI as today have more than 80M tenprint records (criminals of course, and all background checks, school teachers, federal government employees....) - do the math!!!
you don't got me suckers
The Chinese government has a database which is larger by 1 order of magnitude.
It's only that none knows anything about it.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Mr. Yamamoto
Nullius in verba
Someone should tell him that the people are actually interested in privacy. He sounds like a pervert who is bragging about his collection of secret photos that he took from a safe distance.
~ Best man at your service.
One thing is for sure. The facial scanning recognition system that they have in place has made Dubai one of the slowest airports in the world for arrivals. It isn't that the queues are insanely long, it is that the process is insanely slow. It is so bad now (I travelled through Dubai twice last month) that I will seriously reconsider whether I should continue to make stopovers there.
Why would an amiga emulater keep dna records?
At some point the light should go off in everyone's head
... because they'd left their mind open, but now it's safely closed again?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The GP is correct. On entering the US, only Americans and Canadians can skip the fingerprints. It's been this way for at least a few years. You need to get out of your bubble.
Some time back, a major Internet player - I forget who but it might have been LinkedIn - had a breech where millions of passwords were stolen (I'm sure somebody here can fill in the details).
At first, this breach would only seem to be of concern to people who used that service; their accounts were suddenly vulnerable because their passwords were no longer secret. But this breach had even more wide-spread implications than that; suddenly the black-hats had a new and very powerful tool for cracking other systems: a real-world data-dump of live passwords. This not only improved their "dictionary" for brute-force attacks, but also allowed them to create better rules for their cracking tools on which passwords were more likely to be used, thanks to the information they gleaned from these leaks. Cracking live systems became much easier because their tools could give priority to real-life examples rather than blindly attempting every possible permutation.
Now, the situation with the UAE biometric database is not exactly the same, but a lesson should be learned from the password-breeches of the past few years: the value of the information in those databases is more than simply access to whatever locks they control. It can be used - and will be used - in unexpected ways. I can't say I'm smart enough to guess what those ways are (if I was, I probably wouldn't be posting on slashdot), and whatever new technologies are developed with that information are not necessarily evil. But because it is tied so closely to the identity of real people, that information can be very powerful and very dangerous.
Not only should there be safeguards to ensure this information is only collected by responsible parties, but there need to be protections on this information so it does not get released into the wild. Because you can bet that its not only the (supposedly) white-hats interested in this sort of stuff. WE should not be blindly accepting of biometrics (or indeed, any centralization of vital information on people) simply because of the convenience it adds to our lives; there is probably a cost in the long run.
I hope Iran wins the war!
Pffffftttt... It's not going to save them from the jihadis . Democracy, not DNA , is the only thing that's going to stop the jihadis from toppling Saudi and the UAE.
Of cource, hereditary absolute monarchists aren't much interested in that fact....
Good God, why did they choose a Windows 95 system to house that database?
A country of superlatives
In other words : large numbers of people don't just do things considered wrong, disgusting, or otherwise unacceptable in your culture. Your cherished values do not extend beyond a small minority of humans. Sometimes these cultures' members, they're actually proud of this.
If you want to be really, really clear on the subject (but fair warning, you can't erase knowledge once you have it), you can look up why arabic has a word that is generally translated as "thighing", and whether or not it's halal (bonus points for checking the Iranian viewpoint on the matter, and age limits. You might use the search term Khomeini).
You see, differences between cultures go further than clothes and food.
As per the Indian UID website, the current number of enrollments seem to be
over 200 million, and hence larger than the UAE claim. In UID, each enrollment has
10 fingerprints, 2 irises and one face image. I hope India will not become like UAE
in policing its people. (Ref: http://portal.uidai.gov.in)
Well they would just be plain wrong. UID has over 250 million people all 10 fingerprints both iris and a facial scan and is growing by almost 1 million per day. So clearly UAE is not looking very hard.