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

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.