Biometric Security
The security of tomorrow is here today. Gone are the days when you have to do something as primitive as recall a password, just stick your thumb on a specially designed pad and it will scan a digital image of your print and compare it to one file. What makes this technology possible? Where did it start? Where will it go?
This technology is made possible because we are all unique. Though it isn’t completely proven that two people cannot have the same finger prints, it is proven that of five million people, you are unique, if only in that regard. The hope is that biometric security will match a person based on more than one trait, but a combination of traits, for example, a thumb print while simultaneously having your retina scanned. The main problems with biometric security are that it is very rigid and because of that, it has a very high failure rate when identifying individuals.
Biometric Security started out in ancient times, the Chinese and Egyptians began using biometric attributes such as face shape and gait (the way one walks) to identify intruders. Now days, things are little different but fundamentally they are the same. A person makes a template of an identifying characteristic, with this template, acceptable ranges are created and a metric for the person is formed. From this moment on, the person will need to validate himself to the system using as close to the original stance or expression as he did his first time making the metric. It’s because of human emotion, that some facial recognition software makers will take a range of samples over a period of time to improve their success rate of identification.
Tomorrow is today, or at least that’s what they want us to think. Biometrics has a long ways to go both as an authentication mechanism and as a tool in civil service. The government would like to develop this technology for tracking of people. A country this is more likely to happen in sooner than later is the UK. The UK has a very expansive network of closed circuit television cameras all over the country. Implementation of advanced biometric software could lead to real-time knowledge of an individual’s habits, travel patterns, even specifics like how one takes their coffee. The advent of facial recognition as presented new challenges for both law makers and citizens alike, most citizens would feel deeply intruded on if their real time location was just a mouse click away for anyone, government folk included.
In conclusion, biometrics have come a long ways and yet have a long ways to go. The continual development of these technologies presents several privacy concerns and new laws will have to be made governing their use. The real challenges will lay in the fact that it will be the governments pushing for these new technologies so they can be used against the public, this presents new privacy concerns on a level we have not yet seen. How will we cope with these changes? What will tomorrow bring? We’ll have to wait and see.
