Countries are coming to know their poor by name

The Economist, has published a really good piece about the progress made in reducing global extreme poverty over the last twenty years and what it might take to finish the job over the next twenty.

Biometric smart cards get a mention toward the end in the passage below, but this is not a biometrics story, it’s a story of how and why poverty, which used to be an effect of scarcity, can now be defined and addressed as a series of organizational challenges. Biometrics are helping people meet those challenges and we’re proud of the work we’ve done in helping that process along.

Poverty: Not always with us (The Economist)

[…B]y 2030 nearly two-thirds of the world’s poor will be living in states now deemed “fragile” (like the Congo and Somalia). Much of the rest will be in middle-income countries. This poses a double dilemma for donors: middle-income countries do not really need aid, while fragile states cannot use it properly. A dramatic fall in poverty requires rethinking official assistance.

Yet all the problems of aid, Africa and the intractability of the final billion do not mask the big point about poverty reduction: it has been a hugely positive story and could become even more so. As a social problem, poverty has been transformed. Thanks partly to new technology, the poor are no longer an undifferentiated mass. Identification schemes are becoming large enough—India has issued hundreds of millions of biometric smart cards—that countries are coming to know their poor literally by name. That in turn enables social programmes to be better targeted, studied and improved. Conditional cash-transfer schemes like Mexico’s Oportunidades and Brazil’s Bolsa Família have all but eradicated extreme poverty in those countries.

Libya ponders national ID as an instrument of economic development

Libya takes steps to fight corruption (Foreign Policy – Reg. req.)

Libya’s General National Congress (GNC) is debating the newly introduced transparency and anti-corruption bill which they expect to vote on in the next few weeks. The Libyan government, led by Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, is taking practical steps toward fighting corruption and improving transparency in public institutions, following alarming reports of rampant corruption and financial waste in the public sector. These steps are also driven by huge public demand for immediate anti-corruption measures and transparency in post-revolution Libya.

On February 7, the government announced the National Identification Numbers (NID) project. By giving each person a unique number, the government will be able make sure that transfers and payments are going to the right people and avoid manipulations to the system.

It’s hard to help people if you can’t identify them.

Czech Republic: ID hack, performance art, social commentary

How 12 Men Morphed Identities and Still Voted, Bought Guns, and Got Married (Motherboard)

Source: ZTOHOVEN

Basically, twelve members of the collective swapped identities, snagging themselves digitally-altered ID cards that featured blended images of their portrait and another person’s. Make Money Not Art explains further: “With the same haircut, twelve members of Ztohoven took a portrait pictures and using the Morphing software they merged every two faces into one. They applied for new IDs with these photos, but each of them used the name of his alter-ego.”

For six months, they then lived under each others’ identities, purchasing guns, voting, and even getting married. They documented the entire project, which, in a nod to Kafka’s identity-thieved Josef, they called Citizen K.

Sounds like an advertisement for facial recognition audits of ID card applications.

Official web page for “Citizen K.” (English)

Permanent UID service centers

UIDAI launches new services, permanent enrolment centres (NetIndian)

The services that were launched today are Authentication service using Iris, Authentication service using One-Time PIN and eKYC (Electronic- Know Your Customer) service.

Launching the services, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said they would give a boost to the use of the Aadhar identity platform for authenticating the identity of people.

“This is a transformational initiative, and I am sure the Aam Aadmi (common man) will start reaping the benefits of the Aadhaar project in the near future,” he said.

IDaaS

Identity as a Service poised for run in enterprise (ZDNet)

Identity and Access as a Service is poised for a strong run at enterprises of all size, and those who have done their homework will dodge the hype and know what’s right for them and what’s not.

By the end of 2015, Identity and Access as a Service (IDaaS) will account for 25% of all new identity and access management sales, compared with 5% in 2012, according to recent Gartner research “Are You and the IDaaS Market Ready for Each Other?” [ed. link in orig]

Sameer Sharma gets it…

Making cash transfers work: A one-size-fits-all plan to implement cash transfers is unlikely to work in India. Tailoring to local needs is the key

If cash transfers are to fulfil their promise of being a “game changer”, then a paradigm shift has to occur from the supply-to-demand-side subventions. Top driven supply-side interventions get morphed beyond recognition as they pass through several implementation layers.

Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s work in developing countries shows how this happens: in the unique culture of India, people rely more on locally crafted “rules in use”, as opposed to drilled down “rules in form”. And such transformation can be reduced by minimizing the distance between the rules in form and use. This can happen, for example, by giving greater choice to the poor to make the best use of money depending on situational rules in use.

Read the whole thing and if you haven’t watched this video yet, here’s another chance.

See also:
BigID and the changing nature of national identity infrastructures

BigID and the changing nature of national identity infrastructures

Nigeria’s new ID has apps!

Credit card linked to Nigerian ID (Financial Mail)

In the programme’s first phase, Nigerians aged 16 and older and all who have been resident there for more than two years will get the new multipurpose ID, which has 13 applications. It is expected that up to 13m Nigerians will use the product in the first phase.

Among the apps is MasterCard’s prepaid technology, which will give cardholders the ability to make electronic payments. MasterCard says this will also have a positive impact on Nigerians who until now have not had access to mainstream financial services.

This one bears keeping an eye on.

In a couple of pioneering cases, the very concept of “The ID” is shifting

To most people, an ID looks a lot like a product — something useful that the government sells to an individual. Pay your fee; get your card. Lose your card; buy a new one.

India and Nigeria (South Africa is pretty bold, too) are pointing the way toward a future where ID isn’t just a product, though no government is going to give up its ID card product line any time soon. The future as these countries see it is ID as a government-backed platform supporting an ID ecosystem. They have the bucket (database structure). Now it’s being filled (populated). If they get the application programming interface/s (API) right, fasten your seat belt. Things will get really interesting really fast as all sorts of apps hooking into the ID infrastructure become available. Biometric technologies will be an integral part of this transition to “BigID.”

UPDATE:
See also:
Brainstorming UID with Srikanth Nadhamuni
The video there is very informaative and extremely worthwhile.

UPDATE II:
I forgot to mention the UAE as another forward-thinking ID environment. The UAE ID is set to be deployed on smartphones.

Biometrics for mobile ID gaining acceptance among telecoms

Mobile biometrics gaining traction, ‘common’ by 2015 (ZDNet)

Tracy Hulver, chief identity strategist at Verizon enterprise solutions, said: “Biometrics, without a doubt, will become more prevalent as a component or add-on to mobile devices in the coming years.”

Proving people are who they say they are has been a challenge for digital security since computers have been in use, according to Hulver. Biometrics, he added, provided a “multifactor” authentication scheme: pairing “something you know” such as a user ID and password combination, with “something you are”.

She ought to know what she’s talking about.

Delhi: First rickshaw pullers, now street vendors…

Street vendors concerned about Parliament disruptions holding up bill meant for their protection (Times of India)

“If the bill is passed, the police and municipal officials will not be able to throw us around,” said Champa Ben, a street vendor from Ahmedabad. She has been selling fruits and vegetables on the pavement for the last 28 years. “Yet I have to pay Rs 50 per day as protection money to policemen. Even then, they keep throwing away my wares and harass me,” she said.

NASVI president Manali Shah said the government should provide for recording of biometric measurements of street vendors so that only genuine ones are issued identity cards. “Often we have seen politicians manage licences for their people while genuine street vendors are denied,” she said.

Short and sweet version: The street vendors want it and biometrics can help.

Biometrics can help bring order out of chaos is the post on the biometric registration rickshaw pullers.

UPDATE: Event Video Added — Round-up of news on Nilekani’s Washington DC appearance

UPDATED & BUMPED:

The Center for Global Development has posted a video of the event 

Original post follows:

Wednesday, April 24, 2013


India’s Biometric IDs Put Its Poorest on the Map (Bloomberg)

That’s because it was an audience of development specialists, and the benefits of universal ID in poor countries are potentially huge. In advanced economies, proposals to gather biometric data and associate them with universal ID numbers immediately raise civil-liberties concerns. Not long ago the U.K. abandoned plans for a national ID card, partly on grounds of cost and partly because the idea was unpopular. This contrast in attitudes is worth pondering.

In recent years many developing countries have embarked on biometric ID programs. The Center for Global Development’s Alan Gelb and Julia Clark have surveyed 160 such projects and written an indispensable guide: “Identification for Development: The Biometrics Revolution.” As they and Nilekani point out, India’s project is unusual for its scale and scope, and because its aim was to create a system of identification independent of the uses to which it might be put — a platform that can support many uses, rather than one specific application (such as checking eligibility for poverty relief).

Could a program tracking identities of 1.3 billion Indians be the secret to ending poverty? (Washington Post)

This is not, Nilekani insists, a scary example of government intrusion. Rather, he and others described the effort in near revolutionary terms during a lecture Monday at the Center for Global Development in Washington.

Suddenly, said Nilekani, tens of millions of people born without a birth certificate or any formal registration “exist” in the eyes of the government – and can demand services and benefits, get a mobile phone or open a bank account. Putting all the data on the cloud, he said, breaks the monopoly of civil servants over the distribution of such things as food and fuel subsidies.

Once you’re in the database, your identity can be verified at any government office, distributed from a bank, or transferred automatically to a bank account. It’s efficient. It cuts down on opportunities for corruption, such as bribes or what economists call “rent-seeking,” the skim off the top an official might demand for delivering a service.

600 million Aadhaar cards by 2014, says Nilekani (The Statesman)

“Today we have enrolled 380 million of the 1.2 billion people. Our daily processing is about a million people a day. Our goal is to reach 400 million this year and 600 million by 2014,” he said, adding there are between 25,000 to 30,000 enrolment centres in the country.

Noting that this unique identification number is now becoming “an internal passport and gateway” to various services for Indians, Mr Nilekani said by working with various regulators they have ensured that this ID is sufficient to get their services. It enables one to get services quickly and in a hassle free manner, he said.

It’s all ID nowadays

If the one word for the 60’s was plastics and in the 80’s it was all ball bearings, the technology touchstone for the 2010’s figures to be identity.

The “i” in the next iPhone will stand for “identity.” (Cult of Mac)

When people hear rumors and read about Apple’s patents for NFC, they think: “Oh, good, the iPhone will be a digital wallet.” When they hear rumors about fingerprint scanning and remember that Apple bought the leading maker of such scanners, they think: “Oh, good, the iPhone will be more secure.”

But nobody is thinking different about this combination. Everybody is thinking way too small. I believe Apple sees the NFC chip and fingerprint scanner as part of a Grand Strategy: To use the iPhone as the solution to the digital identity problem.

NFC plus biometric security plus bullet-proof encryption deployed at iPhone-scale adds up to the death of passwords, credit cards, security badges, identity theft and waiting in line.

Apple loves to solve huge, hitherto unsolved problems. And there is no problem bigger from a lost-opportunity perspective than digital identity.

The Boston Consulting Group estimates that the total value created through real digital identity is $1 trillion by 2020 in Europe alone.

Read the whole thing. Stripped of the Apple-worship, it’s an astute post.

The link inside the quote above is in the original and the pdf it links to is highly worth a look, as well. From the executive summary…

Increasingly, we are living double lives. There is our physical, everyday existence – and there is our digital identity. Most of us are likely more familiar with that first life than with the second, but as the bits of data about us grow and combine in the digital world – data on who we are, our history, our interests – a surprisingly complete picture of us emerges. What might also be surprising for most consumers is just how accurate and traceable that picture is.

Views on digital identity tend to take one of two extremes: Let organisations do what they need to in order to realise the economic potential of “Big Data,“ or create powerful safeguards to keep private information private. But digital identity can‘t be cast in such black-and-white terms. While consumers voice concern about the use of their data, their behaviours – and their responses to a survey conducted specifically for this report – demonstrate that they are willing, even eager, to share information when they get an appropriate benefit in return. Indeed, as European Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding remarked, “Personal data is in today‘s world the currency of the digital market. And like any currency it has to be stable and it has to be trustworthy.“ 1 This is a crucial point. Consumers will “spend“ their personal data when the deals – and the conditions – are right. The biggest challenge for all stakeholders is how to establish a trusted flow of this data.

A new type of ID is needed to bind our physical and online selves, payments and hardware. If the tech giants are going to finish off the post office and assume the role of credit card companies, they’re going to have to solve the ID problem. If they solve the ID problem, there’s really no telling how many other business models they can disrupt.

Brainstorming UID with Srikanth Nadhamuni

300,000,000,000,000 biometric queries a day

“…[T]he Aadhaar system was deliberately built as an identity platform as opposed to an end user application, so that government departments and private companies/startups could build their own apps leveraging the platform.”

Technology startups have a huge opportunity to leverage the Aadhaar system (VC Circle)

“This is an ecosystem play.”

Sometimes we get bogged down in the scale of the enrollment challenges associated with UID. It’s good to get back to the amazing scale of possible apps that can be spun out of the ecosystem.

That’s not good: 300,000 UID enrollments lost in hard drive crash

Maharashtra loses data of 3 lakh UID cards (Times of India)

The Maharashtra government has admitted the loss of personal data of about 3 lakh applicants for Aadhaar card, an error that has forced the inconvenience of reapplication on unwitting victims and sparked concerns over possible misuse of the data.

Containing PAN and biometric information, the data was being uploaded by the state information technology department from Mumbai to the central Bangalore server of the Unique Identification Number Authority of India when it got “lost”. “The information is encrypted when uploaded. While the transmission was in progress, the hard disk with the data crashed. When the data was downloaded in Bangalore, it could not be decrypted,” said an official from the state IT department, which is overseeing the enrolment of citizens for Unique Identification number (UID) or Aadhaar card. The data mostly belonged to applicants from Mumbai.

3 lakh = 300,000
That data loss represents a lot of people’s time and effort. It will be inconvenient, to say the least, to redo 300,000 enrollments and the data loss has caused some to worry about UID data security.

If the Times of India reporting is accurate though, the data isn’t “lost” so much as it is unreadable… by anyone.

Biometrics can help bring order out of chaos

Special drive for registration of cycle-rickshaws in Delhi (The Hindu)

After years of harassment from the police and municipal authorities, there is finally some good news for the rickshaw pullers and owners. In compliance with the directions of the Delhi High Court, the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) on Wednesday announced a special drive for registration of cycle-rickshaws and rickshaw pullers through their Citizen Service Bureaus (CSB). Likewise, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation initiated the drive on March 25.

According to municipal officials, the process of registration has been simplified and residence proof or proof of purchase of cycle-rickshaw would not be asked from the applicant. The CSBs have also been equipped with biometric machines, to take index finger impressions, and cameras for taking the photographs of the applicants for registration.

This system seems a lot like the recent effort in the Philippines to register all the bus drivers in Manila. Traffic congestion, public safety, and compliance with government licencing are some of the major goals of registration initiatives like these. Biometrics — fingerprints in this case — offer a cheap, convenient means of creating an ID system from scratch i.e. one that doesn’t rely on a pre-existing paper trail.

It is this last detail that is often overlooked by those skeptical of biometric systems. It’s just impossible for some people to imagine what it would be like to be entirely cut off from the ID infrastructure or how to go about creating one for those who can’t prove anything about their own personal history.

What is your date of birth? 
Where were you born? 
What is your father’s name? 
 I don’t know. 

In cases like the regulation of rickshaw pullers discussed, you don’t really need to know anything except that the person attached to this finger paid their fee and is legally entitled to ply their trade. A decent ID system can then be built out from there.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that those challenged with bringing some ID order out of chaos are finding a lot to like about biometrics.

India: UID applications without biometrics highly likely fraudulent

Sometimes it seems as though headline writers don’e even bother to read the articles.

India removes 384K Aadhaar biometric IDs (ZDNet) — Properly speaking, they weren’t biometric ID’s because they were created under the “biometric exceptions” provision that allowed for enrollments to be created without an acceptable biometric identifier. That provision was exploited by unscrupulous registrars who created fake enrollments for which they were paid.

The “biometric exception” was created out of necessity to account for those with unreadable fingerprints or for those who lacked fingers or hands altogether, however three quarters of the IDs generated under the biometric exception clause have been found to be fraudulent.

It is also interesting to note that if UID lacked a provision for the collection of a biometric identifier, it is unlikely that the large scale fraud would have been detected at all.

US Senate: Biometric worker ID sticker shock

Lindsey Graham: Federal ID for Workers Too Expensive (WLTX – Columbia, SC)

Senators working on a bipartisan immigration bill are likely abandoning the idea of requiring a new high-tech federal ID for workers because it’s too expensive.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says cost estimates for the biometric ID card he favors came in higher than expected. The card was intended as a way to ensure employers don’t hire illegal workers.

Real fake ID’s

Facial recognition system leads to thousands of fraud arrests

After kicking off facial recognition technology, the Department of Motor Vehicle says the state was arresting people by the thousands for possible identity fraud. They were even a bit surprised at the number of people trying to cheat the system.

“We’ve arrested 2,500. We’ve taken 5,000 to administrative hearings,” said Owen McShane from the DMV.

Read the whole thing for an education about how lax issuance of legitimate ID documents enables crime.

See also similar items from Washington and Texas.