Eating crisps could be enough to have a fingerprint
reading rejected by the UK's proposed national identity card
scheme. This was one of several concerns about the planned use of
biometrics that emerged from a recent BCS debate.
Crisps make fingers slightly oily, which will affect a reading,
said a biometrics expert at the BCS Thought Leadership Debate. The
event, which brought together specialists in the field and senior
people from industry, the public sector and universities, was held
under a rule of anonymity, allowing frank exchanges of views.
Other issues would also affect biometric readers, participants
said. Would a fingerprint reader work reliably if it was positioned
in direct sunlight? Would it recognise a surgeon with faded
fingerprints from years of hand washing, or a bricklayer constantly
handling rough bricks, or someone facially disfigured after a fire,
or unable to manage an accurate iris scan after becoming blind?
On another tack, if an immigration supervisor at an airport had
15 desks open and one queue was moving faster than the others, how
could the supervisor tell whether this was due to a fault with the
reader? How could the performance of all the readers be guaranteed
technologically?
Biometrics technology has never been used on such a scale as
that proposed for the UK scheme, although biometrics are the future
for travel documents, and international schedules are in place for
their introduction.
This means any national identity card system will need to take
account of international use of an individual's biometric identity.
Secure data stores and the choice of card readers in one country
are not enough when regular international travel is commonplace,
the debate heard.
Countries are likely to award their equipment contracts to the
lowest bidders, so it would make sense for them to bid
collectively. If countries were to bid together, the huge card
reader volumes would get sufficient discounts on higher quality
devices, but every country would have its own card and its own
choice of reader, so the volumes would be smaller, the debate
said.
This also highlights the issue of compatibility across the
world. What is the chance that when you go abroad you will meet a
similar system infrastructure, and similar biometric readers,
configured to similar accept-reject settings as the UK? the debate
asked.
As the UK upgrades and downgrades its threat level in the light
of changing intelligence, will the e-borders infrastructure need to
be adjusted, and will that be possible?
Looking at the overall system, will technology be robust enough
to support identity schemes such as that proposed by the UK
government? No scheme on this scale has been undertaken anywhere in
the world and the technology envisioned is to a large extent
untested and unreliable on such a scale.
Smaller and less ambitious systems have hit technological and
operational problems that are likely to be amplified in a
large-scale national system, participants in the debate warned.
Full debate report
www.bcs.org/bcs/news/thoughtleadership/pastdebates/