Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Can Identify You By Your Brain Waves With 100% Accuracy (business-standard.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have developed a new system that can identify people using their brain waves or 'brainprint' with 100% accuracy, an advance that may be useful in high-security applications. Researchers at Binghamton University in U.S. recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset while they looked at a series of 500 images designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person -- e.g., a slice of pizza, a boat, or the word "conundrum." They found that participants' brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer's 'brainprint' with 100% accuracy. "When you take hundreds of these images, where every person is going to feel differently about each individual one, then you can be really accurate in identifying which person it was who looked at them just by their brain activity," said Assistant Professor Sarah Laszlo. One thing the paper doesn't talk about is the effect of time on the accuracy of the system. People may perceive different things when looking at the same picture a year later, for instance.
As the tinfoil sales are going to be through the roof.
Like fingerprints and other biometrics, will this fall off a bit at scale?
100% accuracy can be misleading. Are they talking 0% false negatives, 0% false positives, or both?
I could easily see a situation where it has 0% false positives, but a high false negative rate.
That is, I could claim that my "Presidential Identification" is 100% right if I said no one I met was the President of the US. No false positives because I never said anyone was President.
Similarly, someone could do it the other way around, claiming everyone was the President and have 100% accuracy because I identified every single President in the sample.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If you don't want to be identified this way, just bring along Morty. Worked well for Rick.
It will take about a 1/2 hour to log in
This is just another of the many advances that will enable the creation of a complete totalitarian state sometime in this century.
FREEDOM WAVES
Ok. So you can uniquely identify one out of fifty. Let's see how that works with over 7 billion people.
Also, would they be able to pull the 50 people out of a crowd of others of unknown scans?
I'm guessing that these signature series they are developing to uniquely identify people will slowly diverge from what the person's actual brain pattern is on observing the images over a period of time.
Researchers... recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset while they looked at a series of 500 images designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person -- e.g., a slice of pizza...
How long before the local pizzeria makes you sign a Terms of Service agreement that says they're allowed to scan your brainwaves while you're looking at a slice of pizza, and then sell that data to the highest bidder?
On a more serious note, using biometrics of any kind to secure systems is kind of dumb, because they can't be changed, even when they get compromised.
Can it tell what (or whom) I am looking at ? That would be great, it could remind me of people's names when I meet them.
Nullius in verba
Some rightly noted that it may be possible for brain waves to change over time. However, I wonder if stress can significantly change the identification? For example, merely looking at images may provide a different brain wave result if the person being examined has a gun being held to their head whilst looking at the images. In kind, what if the person just learned his/her significant other is cheating on them. (By a mattress with an app, surely)
A common biometric issue is that if the information that represents who you are is stolen (a fingerprint, iris pattern, etc...), you cannot easily change it. However, I wonder if appropriately controlled stress or mind exercises can change one's brain pattern?
All they did was to show 500 images to 50 people. The EEG had 50 unique signatures.Unless they repeat the experiment many times, and make sure the same person will make the same signature looking at the same 500 pictures, it is not "identifying" anyone.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How is it determined that every person's fingerprints are unique, that their irises are unique, that blood vessels in the retina are unique, that brain waves are unique?
With things that can change over time, how reliable are the biometrics? Fingers can be injured, retinas can change with macular degeneration and other problems, irises can change when the eye is injured, brain waves???
from the night before, or have drugs (legal or otherwise) in my system ? How does it perform ? It probably does not matter in the instance of allowing people into a sensitive area - might even be a benefit: do you want someone with a sore head near the big red buttons of a nuclear missile ?
I guess they'll need to whittle down the picture content to make it suitable for quickly screening people. Must take a while to get through 500 images.
I used to like Pizza until I tasted one at Pizza Hut recently. Now I almost puke at the sight of a Pizza.
Unfortunately, this study does not prove it's intended use case, which is to identify someone at some point in the future. They recorded a single event and used it to detect the same event in a pile of 500. Any decent programmer can do that. There's no evidence this will be accurate when taking a snapshot a year from when the baseline was taken.
Please view the following 500 images...
Things like PTSD, forms of dementia, or personality disorders come to mind. How do these affect brainwaves in regards to the test?
While I'm not sure about the latter two, I recently listened to a radio-documentary about PTSD and how one company was combining monitoring of brainwaves with various forms of therapy in order to find the most effective treatment, so it stands to reason that heavy stress and particularly PTSD may change things.
It only works on gradual students.
You have to be educated to a certain level, and then you have to be so poor that you volunteer for this type of crap. And then it works, 100% of the time.
They said the participants "looked at a series of 500 images". If they have to look at the whole set for the identification to be accurate that's a lot.
At 10 seconds per picture that would be over one hour and a half. Even at 1 second per picture, and I'd be surprised it could go any faster, this would be over 8 minutes. Even in situations "like ensuring the person going into the Pentagon or the nuclear launch bay is the right person", waiting at the door for over 8 minutes watching the same stupid pictures every day probably gets old quick.
Wants to look up time on phone.
Drags out EEG headset....
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Maybe not for eternity, but many people are unchanging for dozens of years, and I can guarantee you that there are plenty of people that are effectively unchanged from their late teens until death.
The sad truth is that a very large number of people can be characterized as, such and such behavior has gotten me this far in life, and is therefore good enough for me to continue doing. Change in behavior only occurs when people recognize that their old behavior is not good enough; merely being not good enough is not sufficient to cause change.