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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JULY 22, 2003
Why Biometrics Is No Magic Bullet [Page 2 of 2] TROUBLING SIGNS. "All facial-recognition technology does is create a template of a face so we can store it and find it later," says Bernard Bailey, CEO of facial-recognition company Viisage Technology (VISG ). "That way, if I'm looking for someone with brown hair, brown eyes, and a wide nose, it will automatically narrow it down for me. I don't have to go through 20 million photos, maybe just 4 million. This is a technology for authentication and verification, not identification." Still, civil libertarians fear that ubiquitous and unchecked use of biometrics could create an Orwellian society. They believe that employing facial-recognition systems to search for escaped criminals in public areas of Tampa, plus the growing use of video cameras and facial recognition by police forces in Britain, are troubling signs. That's not to say opponents advocate eliminating all biometrics. The American Civil Liberties Union has gone on record as having no problem with using biometrics to secure airport areas or other sensitive facilities, for example. Rather, what bothers the ACLU and other groups is an apparent lack of legal forethought. "The technology is being developed at the speed of light, but the law that governs its use is back in the Stone Ages," says Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology & Liberty Project at the ACLU. "Supermarkets are free to use biometrics in the same way as an airport that needs to verify the identity of a pilot." NOT "FOOLPROOF." The ACLU and others also contend that biometrics has serious technological flaws. If a single false-positive shuts down an entire airport, then one false-positive per day is clearly too many. Yet biometric systems aren't capable of achieving the success rate necessary for those kinds of decisions. "No biometric is foolproof," says Anil Jain, a biometrics expert and researcher at Michigan State University, in an e-mail interview. Jain estimates that as many as 4% of people can't be covered by fingerprint-ID biometrics systems because of the comparatively blurry quality of their prints. To get around this problem, the U.S. Immigration & Naturalization Service, among others, has begun recording more than one biometric measure -- fingerprints, plus hand geometry or facial recognition. Despite biometrics' many weaknesses, sales could grow quickly, according to IBG, which predicts that global biometric sales will rise more than 500% from 2002 to 2007, reaching revenues of $4 billion. The biggest chunk will come from U.S. government programs that have finally made it through the homeland security pipeline. For example, in May the Defense Dept. launched a program to give so-called smart cards to all 4.5 million members of the military. Within a few years, Defense intends to use those cards as biometric tokens to better secure facilities and possibly to track movements. "Most people's first exposure to [biometrics] will be in large-scale government deployments. That will help to drive awareness and the comfort level. Then we'll see it take off among corporations," says Trevor Prout, IBG's marketing director. UNSECURED PCs. Even so, the realization is now dawning that security concerns alone may not be a big enough reason to drive biometrics into every nook and cranny of everyone's lives. San Jose State's Wayman points out that banks have tried biometrics on automated-teller-machine networks and failed, partly because of technological difficulties but also because of the inability of ATM infrastructure to process all the extra data that are collected. And he believes that few people have chosen to secure their personal computers with fingerprint readers simply because they don't see the value in such protection. "There are some specific applications that do make sense to me," he says. "But most of us aren't using biometric technologies in our daily lives." That could remain the case for the foreseeable future. No doubt, biometrics will spread as more corporations use the technology to control access to key facilities and as government bodies such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the Pentagon do the same. But don't expect to see fingerprint readers on car doors or facial-recognition kiosks for admitting hospital patients anytime soon. For the most part, biometrics appears to be a technology whose time has not yet come.
 By Alex Salkever, Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online, with reporting from Jane Black Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
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