Category: biometrics
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The week in review
Highlights of a few random articles that caught my eye this week … Apple and ID As expected, Apple’s letting users store their driving licences and state IDs in Apple Wallet. It’s a significant improvement over current paper and plastic documents, providing users with more choice and control over what information they release. For example,…
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Improving identity assurance and trust
We may live in a digital age, but paper documents – notably passports – are still the most trusted evidence to help prove who we are. It’s not surprising that one of the most common requests made of Government is to provide a secure service for checking the validity of passports. An online Document Checking…
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Biometrics revisited
One day last week I stumbled across the advert above for Biometrics 2006 while trying to sort out my hopelessly disorganised backlog of digital files. In the folder alongside it were my panel discussion notes and closing keynote slides from the same conference. So what was I talking about 13 years ago – and how…
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… the end of biometric security?
This piece on “Imitating people’s speech patterns precisely could bring trouble” in the Economist caught my eye. It mentions a new technology that means any voice—including that of a stranger—can be cloned if decent recordings are available on YouTube or elsewhere To emphasise the problems this creates, it goes on to mention that When tested against…
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Biometrics: enabling guilty men to go free? Further adventures from the law of unintended consequences
Dateline: the near future Setting: the Old Bailey. A tense, invitation-only event. A spectacle of the kind that London has made its own since long before the days of Newgate Prison and the macabre carnivals of the public hangings at Tyburn Tree. Outside, armed policemen, guard dogs and riot barriers prevent the curious crowds pushing…
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Scientific and technological evidence — their impact on public policy
An interesting day yesterday providing evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry into how the Government makes use of scientific and technological evidence. The session was focused on the UK identity card and followed on from the sessions a few weeks ago with Katherine Courtney and her team from the Home Office (a…
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Westminster eForum — implementing ID cards
The text below is a copy of my speech delivered today at the Westminster e-Forum session on implementing ID Cards (keynote speaker Andy Burnham, MP, Home Office Minister for ID Cards). The IT industry has learned a lot about security, identity and privacy. In fact, let me be candid here, as the most obvious, high-profile…
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What future for biometrics? (And our DNA)?
The Personal Genome Project (PGP) raises some interesting issues that could impact our thinking around other identity issues – including the ongoing debate in the UK about identity cards, the role of biometrics and so on. I’ve been wondering for some time how biometrics – which, like our DNA, are not exactly a secret (we leak them…
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Learning from others
As the UK National Identity Card debate continues, there is considerable worldwide technological expertise in this field that can help us ensure the proposals are developed in the best possible way. Of course, no-one claims a monopoly on thinking in this area – but it makes sense to cultivate and capitalise upon this expertise as…
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The UK National Identity Card
Oct 18 2005, the UK National Identity Card The text below is the full version of my article that appears in today’s “The Scotsman”. A well-designed UK National Identity Card could help tackle many problems, including the upward trend in identity fraud and theft. But important technical, security and privacy issues need to be tackled…
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Border control, day 2
Day two of the Global Border Control Technology Summit here in London. And another day of interesting insight into the state of the art around electronic documents, the use of biometrics and automated e-channels. Joseph Atick, President and CEO, Identix, talked about the challenges of both authentication and knowledge discovery. The quality of biometric images is the…
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Border control, day 1
Day one of the Global Border Control Technology Summit here in London. There’s a large, international turnout reflecting the importance of the topic of border control and related identity systems. It’s stated theme is to look at…: … resolving the technological and logistical challenges in the global deployment of biometrics for travel documents, border control and national…
new tech observations from the UK (ntouk) 