Slashdot Mirror
Japan To Begin Testing Fingerprints As 'Currency' (the-japan-news.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from The Japan News: Starting this summer, the government will test a system in which foreign tourists will be able to verify their identities and buy things at stores using only their fingerprints. The government hopes to increase the number of foreign tourists by using the system to prevent crime and relieve users from the necessity of carrying cash or credit cards. It aims to realize the system by the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games. The experiment will have inbound tourists register their fingerprints and other data, such as credit card information, at airports and elsewhere. Tourists would then be able to conduct tax exemption procedures and make purchases after verifying their identities by placing two fingers on special devices installed at stores. The Inns and Hotels Law requires foreign tourists to show their passports when they check into ryokan inns or hotels. The government plans to substitute fingerprint authentication for that requirement.
They're using them as an identifier to connect with your actual currency.
Speak for yourself.
You leave them literally everywhere.
Why not optical retina scans?
But this still leave the problem that every reader must be trusted. We know from ATM machines, this is not the case, and once that biometric data is stolen... you can't change it unlike a password.
I envision a lot of suck in the future.
Just so you know
is the certainty with which I presume anything digital will eventually be stolen if it matters enough to someone else.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Great idea, zero potential for / certainty of abuse! And so secure! Tricking a fingerprint reader requires special advanced technology.
Nice idea, but news bulletin to Japanese government: Crime is already nonexistent in Japan compared to every other destination for foreign visitors, and ease of payment isn't what's keeping people from visiting.
How about you make the country more affordable to visit instead?
Dateline: Tokyo, April, 2016
Today, the US embassy issued a travel warning for Japan. When this reporter asked US ambassador Mumblechops for comment on this, he told me that the number of fingerless tourists returning to the US had crossed an unacceptable threshold. "They can't even hold the panties from the panty vending machines" he said indignantly.
My interview was cut short as the ambassador was called away to a meeting; I caught the phonetics "Love Hotel", an acronym I am unfamiliar with, but which no doubt designates a weighty matter of US national security.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Digital. Finger. Heh. Yeah, they can easily be forged, forced, or stolen (yes, the bad guys WILL lop off digits in Japan. It's a thing.). Anyone with graphite powder and a piece of cellophane tape can get your credentials. Bad idea. Add if you're compromised, you can't change it.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Having only foreign tourists beta test it ensures the Japanese people are not at risk, which should tell you the confidence they have in the system.
Most decent, serious fingerprint scanners also measure temperature ...
My guess is that 99% of tourists that are dumb enough to give up their fingerprints and financial information to a foreign government will be carrying a wallet, anyway.
I use Apple Pay constantly, daily, but I still carry a wallet with credit cards in it.
Just saying that your fingers will be safe since traditional robbery will still work pretty well.
Let's see. Give my fingerprint, financial info and positive identification information to a foreign government. What could possibly go wrong?
10 to 1 odds this is backed by the NSA.
Wow... and there's nothing worse than having to reheat a dead finger for the third time on your dash with the defroster.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is like leaving my bank PIN number and bank card on everything that I touch. Do. Not. Want.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Yeah, because heat is so very hard to come by.
The IQs around here are dropping so fast it's practically palpable.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Excellent idea. Perhaps someone can quickly describe how to revoke a compromised identity when it's based on your fingerprint.
And once my fingerprints are compromised, then what?
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
these poor folks?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Maybe it's due to the lack of heat?
What.
The US govt has been finger printing all visitors for forever now.
So how is Japan doing that any different?
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Sorry, but "ease of payment" isn't why people don't come to Japan. It's not like paying is any different or more difficult than anywhere else. It's not even the price. It's your damn xenophobia. Teach your people some manners and we'll talk about visiting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As Bruce Schneier noted, Biometrics not a panecea...
One more problem with biometrics: they don't fail well. Passwords can be changed, but if someone copies your thumbprint, you're out of luck: you can't update your thumb. Passwords can be backed up, but if you alter your thumbprint in an accident, you're stuck.
There are techniques by which fingerprints can be faked.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
But since finger print scanners are notoriously easy to fool I can see how it'd be worse. Chip+Pin or chip+sig is your best bet to stop electronic fraud.
Now, Japan is well known for preferring cash to plastic but then if you're going to get a business to buy into this complicated scheme and run a fingerprint scanner Point of Sale wouldn't they be just as likely to take cards? And if they don't I'm stuck with cash anyway.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm a paraplegic you insensitive clods!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
What are you smoking? Go to the US and you get fingerprinted. Christ I went to Universal Studios back in 2008 and they wanted your finger print at the gate to go with your ticket.
Japan has zero crime and there is no requirement to use this system. If you are really worried about the govt tracking your daughters purchases get her to pull cash out of an ATM (useful tip 711s ATMs accept foreign cards not all others do) then buy a Pasmo or Suica card in any one of a zillion train stations and load it up with the cash. That card can be used just about everywhere in tokyo. The rest of the time use the cash. Of course if she bends the card or loses it monies gone. But it's anonymous right!?!?
Your daughter going to Japan would be a really good thing for her. She will get to see another highly developed country that has almost nothing in common with the US. She will get to see a totally different way of doing things and hopefully she will come back more well rounded for it.
Don't get all hyped up. Your government has been taking photo ID and fingerprints of all (legal) foreign visitors since ~2002. And as of April 1 this year you can only enter the US with a biometric passport which means my data will be stored in electronic form in one of the many databases the US operate and be susceptible to getting hacked.
The only entity that has my fingerprints is a foreign and rouge government - yours. I have been able to get around a biometric passport until now, so not even my government has any biometric identifiers on me - which is how it should be in an ideal world.
gummy bears con costs you big
http://www.phonearena.com/news...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
You could learn something from them. Perhaps if you just sat back and looked and tried to understand you might realise the country is very different to what you described. Yes she can learn about a country that promotes the group over the individual. But why is that inherently bad? It is the antithesis of the American mindset but it isn't inherently wrong. She can learn about a country that has almost no crime, no crime because society comes first.
As for the patriarchal aspects of their society there are some valid points to that but it is nowhere near the place it was 20 years ago. The marriage by 30 thing is basically gone. Women are consistently holding more and more career positions and the servant to the husband attitude has died. If anything Japan is having issues because their women don't think their men are manly enough.
The big flaw in their plan is that biometrics are not secret and cannot be changed. If you are tracking people who do not want to be tracked, like prisoners, criminal suspects or parolees these are really good attributes. The endpoints also have to be trusted clients, which is also a tricky to enforce security model. If someone can steal or reverse engineer a trusted terminal it will lead to uncontrollable fraud.
It's a bit like having everyone pay with their SSN if your SSN was irremovably tattooed on your wrist.
Government is one thing. Stores and banks are another.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it" ~ Aristotle
Good-bye
"Yes she can learn about a country that promotes the group over the individual. But why is that inherently bad?"
This is sort of like how the idea of 'women and children first' only makes sense in a small society like a village. You are all in it together and it can make sure your genetics gets passed on, even if you die. These ideas work on small scales where there is personal investment with all involved. When you are just a faceless cog in nation of 10s of millions, its super easy for you to be consumed by society with no net benefit for you or your offspring.
Good-bye
Dont blame me, i voted for Kang.
Good-bye
I don't think it is that simple. The US still has lots of things that are done for the greater good at the cost of the individual. That is why there are taxes. That said they sit at the personal focus end of the spectrum, Europe sits with a greater focus on the group than the US and Japan is the next step along. The big difference between Europe and Japan is that the socialist view extends into the behaviours of the people as well as the financial.
When you look at the societies the US has the most individuals with high net worth. But is also has a large number of people with almost nothing. Depending on the survey you use the estimated homeless population starts at 680k and goes up from there. In Japan though homeless people are estimated in the 30k level nation wide with 2014 seeing Tokyo having a homeless pop of 1400.
When you have a large number of disenfranchised people those people will affect those that are still contributing members of society. There is a cost to you as an individual because the group is less well looked after. Be it higher insurances, more spent on security or even potentially direct personal loss or harm.
So, while you can be lost in the machine, I believe there are still significant benefits to the individual that occur through the focus on the group first. Sometimes you will be beneficiary of those benefits and sometimes you will be at a net loss. How that adds up over your life will be a roll of the dice.
Keep telling yourself that. I've travelled extensively throughout Europe, US and Asia, lived in some dodgy parts of London, rural Japan and a largish city in South East Asia, been targeted unsuccessfully by pickpockets in Barcelona, Milan, Rome and London. My wallet was stolen exactly once. It was taken from my kitchen table in my apartment in rural Japan while I was sleeping in the next room. Sometimes complacency is not a good thing - Japanese locals are all very paranoid about crime, to an even greater degree than you see in most countries where the perception of crime is higher.
Japan is still very patriarchal, but has one of the highest ratio of single women in their late 30's and beyond of any country, and such a low birthrate that it is causing house prices to plummet around Japan as the population shrinks. It is perfectly acceptable in Japan for women to pursue a career above marriage, even if the glass ceiling is very much still there and very solid.
> My guess is that 99% of tourists that are dumb enough to give up their fingerprints and financial information to a foreign government will be carrying a wallet, anyway.
Fingerprints are mandatory for all tourists who enter Japan already. Lots of people who enter the US too. Are you suggesting that tourists should simply stop visiting Japan entirely?
Japan is one of the few countries where you could accidentally drop a wallet full of cash and have one of the following happen to you:
1. Go back and find the wallet still on the floor cash intact.
2. Have someone run after you and give you your wallet cash intact.
3. Go to the local police station and get given your wallet cash intact.
There's a lot of things that come to mind when I think of Japan but crime is definitely at the very bottom of that list.
Biometric passport just means that the visible photo is also stored on there as a .jpg
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
If they make it required, I guess I will never visit Japan. Fingerprints should not be used for biometrics. Period.
Using fingerprints and allowing a third-party to have access to that data is unacceptable. Not only because the government should have no need to track what people are doing but because the gov should not have fingerprint registration data (which will be horribly abused) . Every time a national database is searched, if your data is in there, you are being searched without probable cause.
Stand up for your rights, people... and the rights of your children. Once you give this data to the government (or big business), it will NEVER be erased or restricted, regardless of claims or laws- it will go into huge databases and shared between all agencies and used however they want for as long as they want.
There is only one safer and practical biometric I know of- that is deep vein palm scan. That registration data cannot be readily abused. It can't be latently collected like DNA, fingerprints, and face recognition can. You have to know you are registering/enrolling when it happens. You don't leave evidence of it all over the place. When you go to use it, you know you are using it every time. And on top of all that, it is accurate, fast, reliable, unchanging, live-sensing, and cheap. If you must participate in a biometric, this is the one you should insist on using.
Example: http://www.m2sys.com/palm-vein...
But we also need to realize that IT IS NOT EVERYONE'S BUSINESS WHAT WE ALL DO. The first step in securing freedom is privacy. When you are tracked, you are losing your freedom, whether you realize it or not.
1) common condition as people age is loss of fingerprints
2) very easy to spoof - various techniques to both record and then make a plastic overlay
3) worst case fingers can be detached from person
All forms of biometric Id suffer from above to greater or lesser extent. They make great form of Id but any form of authentication ultimately needs some additional data in head
get.google.com/handsfree tldr; Google uses a suite of information to determine who is making a purchase without the purchaser having to do anything other than atmost giving their initials.
> Why not optical retina scans?
Greetings, Warden Smithers!
The good side of this is that more and more cyber criminals will flock to Japan and Japanese gov websites for one stop shopping: credit card and personal data for vacationing owners all in one place. So our data elsewhere in the world will be safer.