technology

Florida, schools, technology

Florida moves to ban school biometrics

This is a biometric database

Senate panel votes to ban biometric data collection in schools (Florida Current)

A key Senate committee voted to stop public school systems from collecting “biometric” data on students, despite warnings that unplugging the computerized systems will waste money and make it harder to move hundreds of kids through lunchroom lines.

“These are children,” said Sen. Dorothy Hukill, R-Port Orange. “There is no reason to scan a kid. Just because the government can do this is no reason the government should be doing this.”

I haven’t read the bill but school yearbook companies, school ID card suppliers, and school photographers might want to make a few calls to the 850 area code. Photos of faces are biometrics, after all.

More posts on biometrics in schools.

Outright technology bans are easy to understand, but they often have unintended consequences and seldom benefit large organizations. It’s better to develop a solid understanding of the appropriate use of a given technology and how it furthers an organization’s mission.

m2sys, modality, science, technology

New book on how biometrics age

Book Review: Age Factors in Biometric Processing (M2SYS Blog)

Mr. Fairhurst assembles his book into four primary sections:

1.) An introduction to the aging process and an overview of biometric systems – setting the stage for discussion on how aging can effect individual biometric modalities
2.) A study of how aging effects specific biometric modalities including physiological and behavioral modalities
3.) A closer look at the topic of aging from the perspective of an industrial viewpoint, a forensics perspective, and the impact of aging on one of the more popular biometric modalities – facial recognition
4.) A look to the future and based on the conclusions of this book, what type and the scope of research that may be needed in the future

market, modality, technology

Innovations in Biometrics for Consumer Electronics

Frost & Sullivan: Integration of Biometrics in Consumer Electronics a Fast-Emerging Trend (Yahoo)

[…]fingerprint recognition will remain the leading biometric technology used in consumer electronics due to its convenience, cost-efficiency and quick ROI. Iris recognition and multimodal biometrics will rapidly grow in the next three years due to their accuracy, although the high cost and large size of iris recognition systems may hinder widespread uptake. Voice and face recognition technologies likewise should find higher usage depending on the security requirement of the application.

More good insight at the link.

privacy, technology

US: Government sues energy company over biometric time clocks

U.S. sues company over miner’s religious objection to handscan (Reuters)

The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission filed a lawsuit against Consul Energy Inc, stating that Beverly Butcher Jr. had worked at the company’s coal mine in Mannington, West Virginia, for more than 35 years, until he was required to use a biometric hand scanner to track his hours.

Consul, with headquarters in Western Pennsylvania, was accused of discriminating against Butcher, who repeatedly told mining officials that using the scanner violated his Evangelical Christian beliefs, given his view of the relationship between hand-scanning technology and the mark of the beast in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, the lawsuit said.

EPIC, privacy, technology

Headline writer gets it backwards

Today I came across what might be a perfect example of a biometrics headline/article non sequitur.

The article linked below, is pretty bullish on biometrics from both the convenience and security angles. In addition to favorable quotes from a user and an industry executive, an Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) staff member is quoted speaking of biometric technologies in favorable terms. As long-time readers may recall, that hasn’t always been the case.

Given all that, it’s hard to comprehend why the headline writer went with:

New technology causes new privacy, security concerns (WJXT – Jacksonville, FL)

I’d quibble that that the headline writer has it backwards. On the article’s own terms a better headline would be, Privacy, security concerns fuel new technology, but reading the article might have given me an unfair advantage.

ROI, technology

Apple announcement also reinvigorates critics of biometric technologies

Column: Why fingerprints, other biometrics don’t work (USA Today)

The Apple announcement has pushed interest in biometrics to new heights and we couldn’t be happier. It has also given renewed attention to those who are sceptical, or even hostile to the technology. I won’t go so far as to point fingers (rubber, gummi, or otherwise) at the sources for the articles out there because they usually bring up valid points and treat the subjects in which they are interested in a holistic manner. That sometimes gets lost in journalistic translation.

Other times the breakdown happens between reporters and headline writers (see: iPhone 5S: Thieves may mutilate owners in bid to gain access to fingerprint-reading handsets, expert warns).

Concerns about biometric revocability, secrecy, and how accuracy changes with database size are valid. Unsurprisingly people interested in biometrics have been dealing with these issues for as long as biometric technologies have existed. The existence of those challenges, however, does not justify the assertion that “biometrics don’t work.” Subjected to the same standards, no security measure works. ID cards don’t work. Passwords don’t work. House keys don’t work. Police departments don’t work. Security guards don’t work.

ID and security isn’t about perfect. It’s about return on investment, or cost-benefit analysis if you prefer. We’ve covered the subject from various angles over the last few years. The piece linked below is as good a place to start as any for interested readers.

Please see:
Biometrics & ID infrastructure: Perfect is the enemy of  good

payments, public opinion, survey, technology

More research shows the public is receptive to biometric technologies

Biometric payment methods set to rise in popularity as consumers steer away from mobile devices (ITProPortal)

Recent research from WorldPay revealed that paying for goods and services through fingerprint, palm and iris scanners is the most popular future technology choice for security-conscious shoppers, far outweighing the popularity of emerging mobile technology options like smartphone and SMS payments, and online wallets.

See also:
Unisys Poll: 63% of credit card users would prefer fingerprint (October 14, 2010)
Unisys Security Index Survey Finds High Levels of Support for Biometric Solutions (May 10, 2012)
Australia: More on survey of attitudes toward banking biometrics (October 4, 2012)

eye, iris, modality, ROI, technology

What will it take for iris ID to catch on?

Readying Iris Recognition for Prime Time (Bank INfo Security)

Federal researchers have reconfirmed the reliability of the iris as an authentication factor. But we’re at least three years away from using iris scanning as an advanced method of user authentication for IT systems.

What’s holding back iris recognition as an authentication tool to access information on IT systems? Several experts I spoke with this week narrowed the reasons to three: size, cost and culture.

Stay tuned on all three. Size and cost are coming down. Culture is less predictable. Could ROI be a useful proxy? The article gets to this question eventually. Read the whole thing.

management, modality, New York, politics, technology

Following Mayor Bloomberg’s remark that public housing should incorporate fingerprinting technology and rumors of Apple implementing this technology for the new iPhones, two experts discussed the state of biometric security and where we are headed with it. (PIX 11)

There’s a good video at the link. I removed the video from this post because of the annoying auto-play feature which comes with the embed code. The video at the link above does not autoplay.

UPDATE: An interesting take on the political part of the story that echoes our Technology-and-Policy theme… Bloomberg is Right and Wrong About Fingerprinting Public Housing Residents (Frontpage Mag)

security, technology

But do sophisticated biometric devices really offer a higher level of protection than traditional security methods?

Though biometrics are becoming commonplace, the debate rages over whether they’re effective (IT Security) but… “If one acknowledges and accommodates their limitations, biometric devices can serve as high-quality protection tools for a wide array of systems, applications and services.”

There’s also a short-and-sweet discussion of the “big three” modalities at the link.

ID, national ID, politics, technology, Uganda

Policy must precede technology

Some Ugandans may miss identity cards (New Vision)

In Mengo and Kisenyi suburbs, many non-indigenous Ugandans yesterday expressed disappointment when officials at the distribution centres demanded proof showing that they were registered Ugandans.

This group included Salim Uhuru, the NRM chairman of Kampala district and councillor of Kisenyi, who has since described the development as discrimination.

“When I reached the distribution table, I was told that I was not supposed to get the identity card. My name and photograph were in the register, but were marked ‘non-citizen’. I also noticed that this was the same case with every other person who was light skinned. This smells of discrimination of fellow countrymen on grounds of their skin colour,” he said.

The title of this post is a variation on the theme that technology is no substitute for managerial skill and wise policies (see here for similar thoughts). It looks like Uganda has some work to do in its ID management infrastructure as it seems that in important parts of the bureaucracy, no one is quite sure what a Ugandan is.

See also:
Poor ID Management Infrastructure Prevents Uganda Little League Baseball Team from World Series Participation

It’s obvious that Uganda has more than a fair helping of ID management challenges. The good news is that it has never been easier to overcome technical challenges. The bad news is that technology can’t force a consensus on who should get an ID.

cloud, fingerprint, large-scale, technology

Bigger, Faster, Cheaper

As databases get bigger, they take longer to search. For a while, and in many applications, nobody really cares. Does it really matter if a criminal database fingerprint search takes one second or 1.5 seconds? A city of 1.5 million people may arrest 40 people on a busy day. In cases like this, the limiting factor to how many times a process can be repeated isn’t in the technology.

But if the world is headed the way many expect, biometric searches of large databases will be moving from applications where fractions of a second don’t matter much, as in the case above, to something that looks a lot more like what banks or large web sites do: handle thousands of transactions per hour among thousands of users with both the quantity of transactions and users fluctuating wildly over the course of a day, and generally increasing over time. Now, how the search happens starts to matter a lot and technique starts to affect cost.

In the biometrics world, sensor and algorithm innovation get a lot of attention. Database architecture and search techniques don’t. This press release from BIO-key is a refreshing change highlighting one technique programmers can use to cope with ever-larger biometric databases.

Accelerated Biometric Indexing Search: New Fingerprint Matcher Design Yields Higher Accuracy at Higher Speeds per Dollar Invested (Press Release via pr-inside.com)

“Using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products, BIO-key is expanding the way a biometric search can be performed which dramatically improves speed over conventional approaches. This revolution comes from the use of a highly parallel search architecture, allowing our solutions to perform faster and look deeper while improving speed and accuracy,” stated Renat Zhdanov, PhD, Vice President, Chief Scientist, BIO-key International.

Initial tests of the new accelerated architecture show speed results of several millions matches per second, on a typical PC. This provides biometric search acceleration of several orders of magnitude on that PC alone. “These performance gains mean the required hardware and support costs for larger systems, or those heavily used in the Cloud from mobile devices or other sources, can now be greatly reduced, providing for thousands of times more throughput per dollar spent,” stated Mira LaCous, Senior VP of Technology and Development, BIO-key International.

demographics, facial recognition, marketing, technology

A discussion of facial recognition and advertising

Consumers Have No Constitutional Protection From Facial Recognition (Internet Evolution)

Over the past decade, marketers have increasingly relied on facial recognition technology (FRT) to create personalized advertisements. FRT depends on complex algorithms to identify a person by measuring the size, angle, and distance between a person’s facial features. FRT then uses this information to search a database of similar features and matches the image to a stored reference photo. Within seconds of capturing an image, FRT can detect and identify a single person in a crowded public area.

Unlike earlier discussions of the use of facial recognition technology used to ascertain demographic characteristics rather than a unique identity, this article discusses true facial recognition in advertising.

Other posts containing longer comments on demographics vs. identity with respect to facial recognition:
Burgeoning Facial Recognition: How come no pitchforks?
FTC Freestylin’ on Face Recognition

face, google, technology

…yet (continued)

Google Glass Will Not Be Offering Facial Recognition (States Chronicle)

This is an appropriate time to repost what we had to say the last time Google felt compelled to disavow facial recognition technology in relation to Glass.



June 3, 2013

If it’s a camera, it can be used for facial recognition

Google outlaws facial recognition apps on Glass for now (CSO)

Google announced late Friday that it will outlaw facial recognition and other biometric identification apps on Glass, its networked eyewear still in prototype phase that’s expected to be commercially released later this year.

“As Google has said for several years, we won’t add facial recognition features to our products without having strong privacy protections in place,” Google’s Project Glass team said in on its Google Plus page.

Google may have publicly said this, however until now its developer policy did not explicitly rule out apps that can do facial recognition.

If it’s a camera, it can be used for facial recognition. Facial recognition is really just a specific type of image analysis. It doesn’t matter where the image comes from. It could be a 19th Century daguerreotype or a picture taken from space. The software doesn’t care. Presumably running the open source Android operating system, as a head-mounted sensor array with a camera, there is little or nothing preventing application developers from passing images collected via the headset through facial recognition applications not developed by Google.

Google’s announcement should be taken to mean that Google isn’t going to integrate facial recognition into Google Glass. Facial recognition apps won’t be on the Google Play store. And, at least for now, they won’t be facilitating face rec. in other Google services such as YouTube, search, Gmail, and Google+. [end repost]

In a twitter exchange, John at M2SYS nails exactly why every Google Glass face rec denial sounds so silly: The device screams for facial recognition applications and everybody knows it.

Terrible with names? Suffer from prosopagnosia? Wonder where you’ve seen that person before? There’s an app for that.

authentication, hardware, technology

The sensor-screen: Two giant leaps

Two things struck me about the news that Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany have developed a type of digital display that can sense fingerprints. World-first: Biometric screen recognises fingerprints (Techworld)

The first is the engineering of the screen itself:

The key that allows Fiberio to display an image and sense fingerprints at the same time is its screen material: a fibre optic plate,” said Holz.

The fibre optic plate is comprised entirely of millions of 3mm-long optical fibres bundled together vertically.

Each fibre emits rays of visible light from an image projector placed below the glass. At the same time, infrared light from a source adjacent to the projector bounces off the fingerprints and back down to an infrared camera below.

That sounds like each pixel is controlled with its own fiber and, theoretically at least, should allow for two-way communication of all sorts of information through the screen. At that point the screen might eventually become the camera, too.

Then there’s the approach to authentication the screen technology facilitates.

Security is one of the main issues around deploying public computers and the researchers addressed this by implementing an additional security layer, which authenticates users every time they try and do something to verify if the respective user has the authority to perform the task they are trying to complete.

The other really big idea this screen-sensor allows is authentication on a per-input-event level, or constant ID verification. Because the screen can “see,” it could always “know,” to some degree, who is using it. With that, the whole log-in/log-out regime could get an overdue overhaul.

FBI, modality, technology, voice

Voice Recognition Capabilities At The FBI

Hirotaka Nakasone, Senior Scientist, FBI Voice Recognition Program, examines the use and effectiveness of current speaker authentication technologies at the FBI. In this IDGA exclusive, Nakasone also highlights the various challenges that are unique to voice recognition, and discusses what plans are in place for capturing voice recordings in line with the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI project).

Definitely worth checking out.

iris, technology

Liveness Detection – Iris Competition

Clarkson University researchers test latest iris recognition technology (North Country Now)

Clarkson’s Center of Identification Technology Research (CITeR), a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, is co-hosting the Liveness Detection – Iris Competition this summer.

Clarkson, along with the University of Notre Dame and Warsaw University of Technology, have invited developers of iris recognition technology worldwide to submit their devices for the competition. The researchers will test the effectiveness of each device over the next couple of months and present their findings at a conference on biometrics this fall.