technology

ID management, technology

Biometrics and user experience

Five potential UX issues with biometrics (Econsultancy)

Biometrics are about people. Tom Stewart’s post reinforces the point and highlights five “potential UX [user experience] issues” — negotiations, if you will — that take place between organizations that adopt biometric ID management technologies and end users.

In brief, they are: Privacy; Reasonableness; Proportionality; Fear; and Behaviour.

The validity of the framework he offers is supported by the observation that it can be applied to all sorts of identity management technologies, not just biometrics.

ID, passwords, technology

Soon, your body will be the only password you need (DVice)

Tiny little computers and sensors are in development all across the globe. And while their development is primarily geared toward a better understanding of our health, there’s another emerging application for their use — biometric security, where your voice and skin and eyeballs are more secure than any password could ever be.

On the one hand, this can sound crazy and too fictitious to be true, especially since it’s been a staple for just about every single sci-fi movie and TV show ever. On the other, we’ve basically already accepted the use of our bodies as sources of information and security.

face, google, innovation, iris, M+A, technology

Read these two together…

Read this…

Emotient and iMotions partner for integrated facial expression recognition, bio sensor and eye-tracking solution (Biometric Update)

Emotient, which specializes in facial expression analysis, and iMotions, an eye-tracking and biometric software platform company, have announced that Procter and Gamble, The United States Air Force and Yale University are its first customers for a newly integrated platform that combines facial expressions recognition and analysis, eye-tracking, EEG and GSR technologies.

According to the companies, the new cobmbined solution is designed for usability research, market research, neurogaming as well as academic and scientific research.

Then this…

Google facial password patent aims to boost Android security (BBC)

Google has filed a patent suggesting users stick out their tongue or wrinkle their nose in place of a password.

It says requiring specific gestures could prevent the existing Face Unlock facility being fooled by photos.

…and then think about Google Glass (or something similar offered by another brand) and the things that become knowable as these technologies are combined and others are added. Iris and face for backward-facing and front-facing ID, knowing precisely what (or whom) someone is looking at when a certain change in neurological activity is noted. Or, precise targeting of weaponry controlled by the eye’s movement along with detailed observations of the neurological states of combatants.

Right now, all of it seems like a long way off, and it is. Significant scientific, technological, and organizational barriers exist. The technology of measurement; the science of interpretation; the fact that a lot of small players own small pieces of the puzzle; integrating the pieces: each present significant challenges. But…

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

Stay tuned. Ubiquitous multi-modal sensors and the real-time ability to interpret and act on the data they collect would have profound effects.

face, history, technology

Interview with James Wayman

Very good interview at Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) with James Wayman on face recognition and other biometrics. Mr. Wayman is the former director of the National Biometric Test Center at San Jose State University and is now an administrator in its Office of Graduate Studies and Research.

Will Face Recognition Ever Capture Criminals? (IEEE.org)

Okay, so, let’s start historically with the technology. It was developed in the early 1960s by a fellow named Woodrow W. Bledsoe, who I believe was an IEEE member. He later retired at the University of Texas at Austin. And what he was doing was marking facial images by hand—the centers of the eyes, the corners of the eyes, the corners of the lips, and the like. And then he projected these marks onto a sphere and he rotated the sphere, trying to get marks from two different images to line up, at which point he could say, aha, these are from the same person.

Well, all of this hand marking didn’t work so well, and in the late 1980s, Sirovich and Kirby came out with this very simplistic idea that is so simple it sounds like it’ll never possibly work, but it did.”

For those who prefer listening to reading, there’s also a podcast…

face, marketing, privacy, technology

Face recognition, marketing and privacy

It’s Your Face. Or Is It? (Press Release at Marketwire)

“From a marketer’s point of view it’s heaven. They can tailor ads, products, even prices based on your age, tax bracket, social media persona and purchasing habits. Marketers will pay handsomely for that information.” For example, NEC has developed a marketing service utilizing facial recognition technology. It estimates the age and sex of customers, along with the dates and number of times that customers go to each store. This information is then analyzed to help predict trends in customer behavior and shopping frequency.

“From a consumer’s point of view this could be a nightmare — the ultimate invasion of privacy.”

Johnson continues, “I’m not just a brand strategist. I’m also a consumer. And I’d like to speak with the voice of reason. New technology can offer enormous benefits. It also comes with enormous responsibility.” Johnson firmly believes we are collectively charged with that responsibility. We have to ensure this facial recognition technology does not become an all out assault on our privacy. “Do we want our children to be added to these facial databases? Probably not. Do we ourselves want to be added without our knowledge or permission? Probably not.”

We tackled the very interesting topics of marketing and the privacy of faces in this post from 2011.

It’s also worth noting that there are two different ways facial recognition technology can be applied to marketing in the bricks-and-mortar world. True face recognition matching a face to a unique individual so as to send a marketing message tailored for that one person is still pretty hard. Inferring demographic traits of a person by using facial analysis technologies does not rely on a unique identification and may provide a bigger bang for the buck (ROI) than true facial recognition.

intelligence, modality, technology

Biometrics: A New Intelligence Discipline

New technological choices bring challenges (C4ISR Journal)

The intelligence community is pushing to make biometrically enabled intelligence — the art of identifying people by fingerprints, digital mugshots, iris scans or DNA — a regular part of business.
…
But other technologies are coming online. Facial recognition algorithms could someday riffle through mugshot databases to find matches much as fingerprint algorithms do today. Iris-matching technology is another field under development. Authorities around the world are rapidly switching from fingerprints to iris scans for verifying the identities of travelers and workers, and iris databases are growing. And some biometrics experts are aiming for multimodal biometrics in which fingerprint matches would be combined with facial recognition and other measurements to determine someone’s identity with maximum confidence.

Read the whole thing.

development, fraud, ID management, South Africa, technology, welfare

South Africa: Social grants spokesperson deems biometric technology “a worthy investment”

Analysis: State of the art technology behind SA’s social grants (The New Age)

The latest biometric technology used by the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) to disburse social grants to about 16 million beneficiaries on a monthly basis is proving to be a worthy investment in making life easier for beneficiaries of social grants.

The number of beneficiaries of social grants in South Africa grew from 2 million in 1994 to about 16 million in February 2013. Of these an estimated 11 million are Child Support Grant beneficiaries.

Since March 2012, Sassa has been engaged in the process of mass enrolment of all beneficiaries using the latest biometric technology. This followed a major announcement by Minister of Social Development Bathabile Dlamini on behalf of the government. The technology includes finger and palm verification as well as voice recognition to ensure that the grant money is paid to the relevant beneficiary at all times.

I didn’t realize that the number of people Sassa has to keep up with had expanded eight-fold in less than twenty years. It’s probably a god idea to automate fraud detection in a disbursements organization that is growing as rapidly as that. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how a fraud detection system that depended upon old-school detective types could keep up. Creating the human capital and cultural climate for their success is a long and expensive process.

adoption, banking, mobile, payments, technology

It worked for the credit card companies…

…Adding financial-management tools and rewarding consumers could increase use of mobile phones as payment devices

Accenture survey on attitudes toward using more services via mobile platforms

More than half of respondents who currently use their smartphones to make payments said they were highly likely to pay by phone more often if they could use their phone to track receipts (cited by 60 percent of respondents), manage their personal finances (56 percent), or show proof of insurance (56 percent) or of a valid driver’s license (54 percent).

In addition, more than half of those who currently make mobile payments also said they were highly likely to pay by phone more often if they were offered: instant coupons from retailers when buying by phone (cited by 60 percent of respondents); reward points stored on their phone for future purchases at the store (51 percent); coupons that could be automatically stored on their phone (50 percent); or preferential treatment, such as priority customer service (50 percent).

banking, identity theft, privacy, technology

Survey: Banking customers willing to share more personal information for more personalized service

Internet of Things and Other Tech Consumers Want from Banks: Survey (American Banker)

A global survey Cisco released Monday offers clues to the types of technology consumers want to use to interact with their banks. One finding was that 69% of U.S. consumers would provide more private information in exchange for more personalized service, higher security against identity theft, and greater simplicity in managing their finances. These enhanced services could harness “the internet of things” in which everyday objects transmit information to a network.

More specifically, 83% of consumers said they would be willing to provide details about their financial habits and have their banks be more active advisors in exchange for greater protection from identity theft. “There’s an awareness that identity theft is a very ugly thing to have happen and that banks are naturally going to be targets,” says Al Slamecka, marketing manager, Financial Services, for Cisco. Many U.S. consumers (53%) would be willing to offer up biometric identification like a fingerprint in return for better protection against ID theft.

More interesting findings at the link.

Big Data, face, IT, law enforcement, management, public, technology

Putting the mosaic together in Boston

The post’s title refers to the mosaic of information that can be arranged into a picture of the events leading up to the savage acts. The other mosaic, the way things were for so many unique individuals, can never be put back together.

How This Photo of the Boston Marathon Gives the FBI a Bounty of Data (Wired)

The photo — click to enlarge — shows a lot of people, what they’re wearing and where they’re positioned within the crush of Marathon fans. It’s important to law enforcement, as it “can be of use in putting the mosaic together,” says Robert McFadden, a former Navy terrorism investigator. Crabbe’s wide-angle panoramic photo “could be one of the many critical pieces of the map of the investigation.”

The panorama photo was one of seven shots Crabbe snapped with her phone during a leisurely stroll and later handed over to investigators.

The Wired article starts with a single data point (data set, really), a photo, and follows it part-way through the process the FBI has used during its investigation of the recent bombings in Boston.

…putting the mosaic together. It’s a good metaphor for how the people charged with figuring out what happened and who did it go about their work. Read the whole thing.

Also see:
What’s Going on Behind the Scenes of Bombing Investigation? Forensic Scientist, Former DHS Official Shed Light on Tech and Tactics (The Blaze)

“Facial recognition technology will play a very small part,” Schiro told TheBlaze in a phone interview.

“A lot depends on the quality of the images you have to work with,” Schiro continued noting that lighting, angle and other factors could really limit the use of facial recognition in the case. Not only that but there would need to be some sort of match for it to recognize.

UPDATE:
Here’s another good article about facial recognition and crime solving. I selected the two paragraphs below because they highlight both the organizational issue of interoperability and the technology issues around matching. There are other interesting insights in the rest of the piece.

Facial Recognition Tech: New Key to Crime Solving (The Fiscal Times)

However, it’s likely the FBI was unsuccessful in identifying the suspects using FR because either they didn’t have a quality image of the wanted persons, or the suspects were not in any of the databases the FBI has access too, Albers said.
…
While facial recognition technology has high-accuracy when used to match a clear image of a person with another passport-style photo, it is not as effective when used with low-quality images like the ones the FBI released on Thursday. The standard for facial recognition to be accurate requires 90 pixels of resolution between the two eyes of the pictured person. The pictures the FBI released of the suspects were about 12 pixels between the two eyes, said Jim Wayman, the director of the National Biometric Center.

and..
Facial-recognition technology to help track down criminals – Humans are still better at it (Kuwait Times)

Search for Boston bombers likely relied on eyes, not software (Reuters)

These last two reminded me of the (Facial Recognition vs Human) & (Facial Recognition + Human) post from November 2011.

In the Boston case, it looks like there were two barriers to effective use of facial recognition technology in identifying the suspects. On the “evidence” (probe) side, the image quality was poor. On the enrollment (database) side the only “correct” match was likely to be in a very large database such as the Massachusetts DMV database.

If only one of these conditions were true — for example a bad probe against a small database, or good probe against a large database — facial recognition technology might have been of more help.

Crowd-sourcing the ID challenge to a large number of human beings that operate with a lot more intelligence and information than facial recognition algorithms is another option. It’s been used with photographs since at least 1865 and without photographs since at least 1696.

One crowd-sourcing fact that law enforcement officials must consider, however, is that the suspect is almost certainly in the sourced crowd. If the suspect already knows he’s a suspect, that’s not a problem. If he doesn’t already know he’s suspected, that information is the price of getting the public’s help which means facial recognition technology will retain its place in the criminal ID toolkit.

UPDATE:
Boston police chief: facial recognition tech didn’t help find bombing suspects (Ars Technica)

“The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver’s license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation,” the Post reported on Saturday.

Facial recognition systems can have limited utility when a grainy, low-resolution image captured at a distance from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a known, high-quality image. Meanwhile, the FBI is expected to release a large-scale facial recognition apparatus “next year for members of the Western Identification Network, a consortium of police agencies in California and eight other Western states,” according to the San Jose Mercury News.

border, government, ID management, immigration, management, technology, UK

Britain’s immigration system since 2000

Immigration issues have been hot topics in both the US and the UK.

Visa consultancy WorkPermit.com provides a short recap of the history of the United Kingdom’s border management this century.

Former UK immigration boss says system has been out of control since 2000

It’s a pretty grim assessment. Turning the situation around will require talented managers operating within a more flexible political environment applying the best technology to the task. Easy for me to say. The technology part, while difficult, is by far the most easily met of those three preconditions for success.

fingerprint, technology

A humorous meditation on our modern times

Of course there’s a biometrics angle…

Dermatitis Could Make Fingerprints Unreadable (Scientific American)

Of course, the study was performed not to elucidate ways by which criminals’ hands can help them avoid the long arm of the law. The real purpose was to determine if a lot of people might have problems with increasingly common biometric identification systems. If a thumb scanner must identify your print before you can enter your workplace, a skin condition could leave you out in the cold, perhaps literally, which is only going to make that chapped finger even less readable.

The growth of biometrics is spurring a growth of finger research.

application, industry, software, technology

Start with the applications

10 Big Data Trends From the GigaOM Structure Data Conference (eweek)Good observations having broad applicability in understanding how the recipe for organizational success is being rewritten. Read the whole thing.

Money quote:

While big data might be getting ahead of itself in enterprise promises, it is real in bringing new capabilities to business. You need to think about the skills you have in your company and developing the data skills to adapt to this new model. Open source, which often has a bit of a fringe reputation in the enterprise, will be part of your technology future. Established vendors are going to promise they can give you all the capabilities of the startups with added stability, but I haven’t seen any evidence so far. Think about your applications from the outside in, instead of inside out.

The application, not the technology, is everything.

face, government, Home Ministry, passport, ROI, technology, UK

Face rec false rejects, organizational false accepts and ROI

Britain’s passport and ID service seeks facial recog tech suppliers (The Register)

The Home Office plans to spend up to £16m on facial recognition technology for the Identity and Passport Service.

A tender notice in the European Union’s Official Journal (OJEU) popped up this week that showed that Theresa May’s department was now on the hunt for providers of a Facial Recognition Engine and a Facial Recognition Workflow for the IPS.

The article then proceeds to a brief discussion of the pros and cons of the tender. The pros follow the benefits of a facial database search before issuing new photo ID documents (click for a good example). In this case the ID documents are British passports. The cons presented in the article come in two flavors, price and performance.

The money issues are common to any governmental expenditure.

The performance issue in the article that I want to address is “false reject rate.” The false reject rate of a facial recognition system in the case at hand should be taken apart and put into two categories. The first category is the performance of the core face-matching technology, the second category is the performance of the entire Home Office organization.

What constitutes a “false reject” in the core technological sense is any “match” made by the face recognition system between a submitted image and the images in the searchable database that turns out to be an incorrect/inaccurate match. In other words, “matches” that aren’t real matches are false rejects.

But in this case, the Home Office is ultimately judged, by how many bad passports it issues (false accept), not by the perfection of one mechanism in a rigorous process by which the organization arrives at its go/no-go decision. After all, if my name is John Smith and I submit my passport application to the Home Office, they will probably search their databases for “John Smith.” If they find several, does that constitute an automatic false reject? Does that mean I can’t get a passport? Of course not. Someone will look at the list of John Smith’s to see if I’m pretending to be someone else with the same name.

Here, facial recognition is used to add an image capability to go along with the search the Home Office already does with new passport applications. It is not an automated decision-making engine. Even though facial recognition systems at very large scales or in chaotic environments are very difficult to automate, they can be extremely useful investigative tools for trained users.

Humans are pretty good at matching faces with small data sets. The processes people use to identify other people with high confidence levels are extremely complex and may take into account all sorts of information that facial recognition software doesn’t. People, however, aren’t very good at identity management among large numbers of people they don’t know.

In biometrics, the software takes in a mere fraction of the information people use. It doesn’t make any inference about it, and it does its job extremely quickly by treating the problem in a way that closely resembles Nikola Tesla’s famous critique of Thomas Edison: “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.”

When dealing with people we don’t know, humans are relegated to the needle-in-the-haystack process and unfortunately, they do it so slowly as to make it impractical with large data sets. Even if you believe that computers running facial recognition software aren’t very good at recognizing people, they’re way better at dealing with the problem of large populations than people are.

The assumption buried in the “false reject” critique for this face-rec application is that narrowing a list of 300,000 down to ten possible matches represents 9 failures. More accurately, because pre-face-rec no image-based comparison is being conducted at all, it represents 299,991 successes

When biometric software is used to sort a large population according to the probability of a match, then to present the list of top candidates to a person trained to detect fraudulent passport applications, the result is a fraud-detecting capability that did not exist before. So, even though facial recognition software by itself may have a “false reject” rate, it does not operate in a vacuum and will almost certainly help the organization as a whole reduce the inappropriate issuance of passports, i.e. its “false accept” rate

So we finally arrive where we should have been attempting to go all along — Return on Investment (ROI). ROI can be hard to calculate in security applications. It can also be hard to calculate for government expenditures, but ROI is where the rubber meets the road. The proposition does not turn on whether facial recognition can dictate to human beings whether or not to issue a passport. It can’t, and even if it could, most people would probably be uncomfortable giving up their right to appeal to a person in a decision-making capacity. Facial recognition can certainly help people make better decisions, though, and biometrics and ID are ultimately all about people.

Raconteur, technology

Raconteur special report on biometrics

I’ve been waiting for this since I first became aware that Raconteur’s special report on biometrics was in the works. It doesn’t disappoint.

Click here for the report’s home page. Or here for the pdf version.

The report includes a useful infographic: Biometrics by the Numbers

Articles in the report:

Oldest ‘new’ technology is science of the future

Make way for knobbly kneed ID… or who’s this ear?

The workplace just got smarter as business wakes up

Using your body as a security shield to safeguard data

Blame bad policy not the technology

Striving to do the right thing

Future of biometrics is in hand

“Oldest ‘new’ technology…” and “Blame bad policy…” are particularly good.

DHS, government, immigration, technology, US, visa

US visa overstays: An ID problem or a management problem?

Everyone except the Department of Homeland Security (the US Congress apparently mandated a biometric exit logging system over a decade ago) seems to agree that a biometric check in/check out system is the way to go, but according to:

U.S. Struggles to Nab Visitors Who Overstay (Yahoo)

The department is no longer focused on implementing a biometric system, one relying on fingerprints or other unique personal markers, to make sure someone leaving the country is the same person who entered on a particular visa. Instead, the department has begun comparing lists of people with expired visas with lists of foreigners who depart through airports and seaports.

In order to be appropriately bewildered, one really must read the article in its entirety. For example: Among the reasons cited by the Secretary on behalf of the famously frugal DHS is that a biometric system would be “extraordinarily expensive.”

access control, logical, Password, technology

Coopetition: Biometrics and Passwords

Startup Prepares Alternative to Online, Mobile Banking Passwords (American Banker)

As banks struggle to move past passwords, a Silicon Valley startup is taking a stab at a fingerprint and facial recognition standard backed by some heavy hitters — PayPal and Lenovo among them.

Despite hopeful initiatives, demise of passwords years away (CSO)

Security pros have been saying for years that password protection is not enough. And this week, two groups — one private, one public — announced initiatives to create more secure ways to authenticate identities online.

Several security experts, who would love to see passwords retired, said they will be watching those initiatives with interest, but don’t expect mainstream change for at least the next several years.

Passwords are the ID management security method everyone loves to hate. So why are they still everywhere? Why is their number growing without signs of slowing?

In their A Research Agenda Acknowledging the Persistence of Passwords, Cormac Herley and Paul C. van Oorschot tell us why.

Passwords, though unloved, deserve some words of praise. They have brought us this far: they are the means by which two billion Internet users access email, banking, social networking and other services. They are essentially free from the service provider viewpoint, and are readily understood by users. They allow instantaneous account setup. Revocation is as simple as changing the password. Those who forget their passwords can be emailed either reset links or the passwords themselves (this practice, though insecure, is common for low-value sites). All of this is automated and instantaneous. They allow access to one’s accounts from anywhere in the world assuming nothing more than a simple browser. Sophisticated users can protect themselves from many of the threats.

The part about them being essentially free requires qualification (which the authors offer), but that’s a pretty impressive list.

So it’s good thing for us in the biometrics business that biometrics don’t need to supplant the password altogether. For the moment biometrics can’t compete on cost to root passwords out everywhere. But I’d like to discuss two (there are more) instances where biometrics can and should be used to limit the risks organizations expose themselves to by over-reliance upon passwords.

Databases of customer information should be biometrically protected. 
From an organizational point of view, for many many service providers, allowing customers and users to protect their individual accounts with passwords, exposes the organization as a whole to minimal risk. Some relatively predictable number of users who use passwords will choose poor passwords, some will become victims of phishing scams. If the costs of sorting these cases out are less than the costs associated with burdening all users with more onerous security protocols, then the password is the appropriate solution. But at some point, all databases of user/customer information should be protected with biometric access control methods because, while having occasional users pick weak passwords or get tricked into giving them away is one thing, hackers making off with the entire database of user/password information is something else altogether. Requiring biometric verification of all human database Administrator logins would go a long way to lowering the biggest risk of passwords: their wholesale theft. In many ways the Admin level is the perfect point to introduce these more rigorous security protocols. There aren’t (or shouldn’t be) too many Admins, so the inconvenience falls on as few individuals as possible. Admins are tech savvy, so they should be able to adapt to the new security environment quickly. They should have an understanding of why the extra step is worth the effort. It’s their responsibility to keep the keys of the kingdom. Perhaps most compelling, they’re the ones on the hot seat when the CEO is out apologizing to all and sundry following a data breach.

Biometrics can also be used to overcome some of the limitations of passwords in more mundane password use models.
Biometrics can facilitate the use of more complex passwords that change more frequently and hence are more secure. [See the laptop fingerprint sensor (i.e. biometrics to control a password management application).]

In higher value authentications, biometrics can also be used as a way to return the password to the simplicity of the PIN. For example: a fingerprint scan associated with a weak password such as a 4 digit PIN provides far stronger authentication than any password a human could be expected to type*. In other words, biometrics can be combined with rudimentary passwords to bring an end to the “password arms race” where the main coping strategy has been longer, more complex and more frequently changing passwords — i.e. the real reasons people tire of the humble workhorse of the ID game. So instead of replacing the password, biometrics might one day be used as a way to salvage what makes it great while minimizing the frustrations associated with over-reliance upon it.

*This type of model also has virtues regarding the irrevocablility of biometric identifiers, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this post.

development, exceptions, infrastructure, ROI, technology

Biometrics & ID infrastructure: Perfect is the enemy of good

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.
—John Ruskin

Everybody knows that there’s nothing perfect in this world, yet plenty that is imperfect also happens to be very useful.

Identity management is one of these. Conducted by people to account for people, with human beings on both sides of the equation, perfection is out of the question. Only someone who misunderstands the ends of the art of ID can reject a certain solution because it falls short of perfection.

Is using a name to identify a person perfect?
Some people can’t speak. Some people can’t hear. Some people can’t read. Some can’t write. Many people share the same name.

A token?
Tokens are lost, stolen, counterfeited.

Maybe a photo then?
Some people can’t see.

Fingerprints, then?
Some people don’t have hands, at all.

Iris?
Some people don’t have eyes.

People cope with imperfection in all aspects of their lives including identity management. Planning for exceptions to the routine ID management transaction is something all existing ID management systems already do. Biometrically enabled ID management systems are no different.

None of the above ID techniques is perfect yet (especially when combined) they are all useful. In this context, a proper understanding of Ruskin’s “ends of art” is Return on Investment, not perfection. The economic value of something does not lie in its perfection. It lies in its ability to help improve things by a measure exceeding the sum of its costs.

What distinguishes biometric systems from earlier ID management techniques, especially in the development context, is that they are an extremely effective and affordable means of establishing a unique identity for individuals among populations that have not been highly organized in the past.

Low access to education? High illiteracy? Poor birth records? Highly transient populations? Recent wars left high numbers of orphans or displaced people? New democracy? For countries answering “yes” to any of these or other similar questions, biometric systems are about the only economically viable choice for developing the ID infrastructure that people who can already verify their identity take for granted.

Additionally, when compared to the investments made by the powers of the Industrial Age to develop their ID management systems —  investments still out of reach for the governments of billions of people — biometrics while cheaper, seem capable of outperforming Industrial Age systems. We know this because existing systems using the best Industrial Age techniques have been audited using biometrics. When the older systems are audited with biometric techniques all sorts of errors and inconsistencies are discovered, errors whose numbers would have been reduced significantly, had biometrics been used in the creation of new profiles in the relevant ID systems.