India's Billion User Biometric Odyssey

mask.of.sanity writes "A bold new biometric identity system is being deployed across India in a bid to combat rampant welfare fraud. The mammoth system will collect the iris and fingerprint records on a voluntary basis of every one of India's 1.2 billion men, women and children. The Aadhaar project runs three trillion biometric identity matches every day — all on a small data center of commodity blade servers."

Comments

Got mine 2 years ago, why is this news now?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was rolled out 2 years ago.
The intended use:
When a unique ID is issued, you can optionally associate a bank account with it. Govt. will transfer welfare benefits directly to that account, "avoiding" corruption. Many are miffed by this as they stand to lose control over, benefit distribution and there by votes.

System abuse scenario is plenty, as your iris scan, finger prints(all 10) are associated with the ID.
Funnily, the ID states that this is only for identification, and not a document of citizenship.

Biometrics are usernames, not passwords

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

This system is guaranteed to fail. As I understand it, the problem it is meant to address is welfare fraud - criminals collecting the welfare of the poor for themselves.

Best case, this works for a year or two as the criminals figure out how to spoof the biometrics. Maybe local gangsters force the poor people to give up their biometrics - take their prints and photos of their irises and then use copies (ala the recent iphone hack and the similar spoof via a photograph of the original iris). If the scanners at the welfare locations are manned, they just need to bribe the guy manning them into letting them use the spoofs. Undoubtedly the guy manning the system is going to be some low-paid peon anyway.

Re:Stupidity on a Massive Scale is still Stupidity

[Joce640k]

That is the problem biometrics were INTENDED to solve. But all wishful thinking aside, so far nobody has been able to DESIGN a biometrics system that actually solves it.

Nirvana fallacy

Just because it doesn't solve the problem 100% doesn't mean it isn't damn useful.

I'm not saying it isn't evil, but in India it may be the lesser of two evils.