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Story: Medical fears may hamper acceptance of biometrics

Posted by: adebayo omo-dare (Friday 31 October 2003, 7:36 PM)

One cannot help but love the proponents of biometrics...
Its something about the way they confidently speak... as if to have discovered some final solution to a final solution hindered by naivety. Its almost as if they do not see their greatest vulnerability - that region of space in which the transition is made between man and machine, a place where deception of machine can run rife.

One can only believe that there will be a great trade in permanent/perpetual data once biometrics takes hold. Who knows, possibly a cracker would be able to capture images of the iris and fingerprints of the president of the US. Maybe with them he will be able to issue instructions that enable the launch of some ballistic system in some unknown direction.

It would also be possible to store such data for years without using it. It will be just as good at whatever point in time it is used, 10yrs, 20yrs....no limits. Better than credit card info, to any criminal, in our networked economy.

Of course, before biometrics really becomes popular it would appear to be the safest option. Yet it is at this point in time that information is most vulnerable.... The glass you pick up at a pub, the camera you look in to, etc... all of the are capture devices....

How complexity lives to breed even more complexity in the face of adversities... Great fun to come....