Privacy issues surrounding biometric technology

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center have sparked in-depth discussion and study of existing security measures, their shortcomings, and how to improve security to prevent similar terrorist attacks from occurring in the future. Biometric technology has risen to the top of the list as a possible solution. The government is not the only entity exploring biometric security systems. The financial services industry sees biometrics as a way to curb identity theft. Biometrics are intrinsic physical characteristics that are used to identify people. The most widely used biometric data are fingerprints, but others include handprints, facial features, iris and retina scanners, and voice recognition.

Shortly after September 11, there were requests for the issuance of national identification cards that contain biometric information on an RFID chip implanted in the card. The argument is that national ID cards will increase security by identifying people with their unique fingerprints, which are much more difficult to forge than standard photo ID cards. There is also a movement towards biometric passports. It looks like biometric passports are coming soon. They can follow the national ID cards.

Biometric identification is nothing new. Humans have been identifying other human beings biometrically since the beginning of time. You recognize the people you know by their facial features, voice, and other biometric features. The new thing is to introduce technology in the combination that compares a biometric data with a stored database of biometric data to verify the identity of an individual. An individual places their finger on a fingerprint scanner and the image is compared to the database to verify the identity of the person. As promising as it may be, biometric technology has not been without its hiccups, but biometrics is advancing rapidly and becoming more and more prevalent in security systems.

Fingerprints are the most widely used biometric identifiers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted a study that showed that individual fingerprint biometric systems had an accuracy rate of 98.6 percent. The accuracy rate increased to 99.6 percent when 2 fingerprints were used and to near perfect 99.9 percent when 4 or more fingerprints were used. The results of the study show that biometric identification is near perfect, which is not surprising given the uniqueness of human fingerprints.

The US-VISIT program, which is an acronym for the United States visitor and immigrant status indicator technology, currently requires foreign visitors to the US to present a biometric passport containing 2 fingerprints and a photo digital for identification purposes before they are granted admission to the US Of course, biometrics is compared to a vast network of government databases filled with terrorists and other known and suspected criminals.

On the surface, biometric technology may seem like a panacea, but its use has raised significant privacy concerns that need to be addressed. Here are six main privacy concerns: storage, vulnerability, trust, authenticity, linkage, and ubiquity.

Critics wonder how the data will be stored and how vulnerable it will be to theft or abuse. Confidence issues focus on the implications of false positives and false negatives. Can biometric data be used to link to other information about the person, such as marital status, religion, employment status, etc.? And finally ubiquity. What are the implications of leaving electronic “breadcrumbs” to mark a trail that details every move an individual makes?

Until these issues are addressed, privacy advocates will lead a charge to resist biometric technology claiming it is a way for the government to assume a kind of “Big Brother” rule as outlined in George Orwell’s novel 1984. But no matter how much they protest, concerns about national security and the ability of biometric systems to improve US border security and possibly prevent another major terrorist attack are likely to prevail over privacy concerns.

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