Report - Guardian

The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005 175feedback. Some problems, however, cannot be addressed through re-design and arelikely to persist. Correct positioning of the body, and presenting the eye in focus to aniris scanner, is difficult for many users. This will present problems to people withcertain eye conditions, and to many people who are not using the systems regularly.With regular use, usage time can be around 12 seconds per user per identification, butfor infrequent users, usage times increase substantially, and each failure to verify willslow the process down further, and/or demand additional resources for checking identityby other means.Accessibility: A small percentage of people (which would nevertheless amount to tensof thousands for a national ID card) are unable to enrol fingerprints or iris images.Ability to recognise both characteristics is known to decline with age (fingerprints weardown, some eye conditions increasing with age cloud the eye), and operation ofequipment becomes difficult with some conditions related to ageing (e.g. arthritis andtremor can impair ability to place fingerprints, positioning and focussing of the eye withdeteriorating eyesight, and drooping of eyelids can cover so much of the iris that animage cannot be computed). There has been no scientific study to determine the stabilityof biometric characteristics over time. Apart from ageing, fingerprints may becomeunrecognisable because of cuts or burns, extreme weight gain or loss.The vast majority of biometric trials have been in the “frequent traveller” context, usingvolunteers who are predominantly white male professionals in the age group between20-55 years old. A UK Passport Service trial funded by the Home Office had arepresentative sub-sample of the whole population, with 10,016 involved, but a quotasample of 2,000 only. 750 disabled participants were involved, though this was 250short of the target number.Face recognition has a lower failure-to-enrol rate (if removal of veils for enrolment andverification is compulsory), but has in past trials shown false rejection rates of around10% (i.e. every 10th user with a proper ID card would not be recognised and would besubjected to a further test). For the Smartgate face recognition system in Sydney airport(the security check for Qantas air crew), an average processing time of 14 seconds, anda false rejection rate of 2% is reported. It is to be noted, however, that this performanceis achieved with regular (daily) users who were given special training, and buildingmeasures to control lighting, as well as live updating of the templates (i.e. the imagetaken to verify is used to keep the reference image up to date). These measures are notonly expensive, but updating of images cannot be contemplated for the ID card, sincethe security risks of doing this in a distributed system (i.e. biometric equipment atvarious border control points a citizen might pass through) are unacceptable.Acceptance: Many people have concerns about interacting with biometric technology.Contact sensors (e.g. those used for fingerprint recognition) raise hygiene concerns. Irisrecognition raises concerns about potential damage to the eye in longer-term use, andwhether the iris image could be used for health diagnostics. Whilst from a scientificpoint of view, these concerns are without basis (touching a fingerprint sensor is nodifferent from touching a door handle; taking photographs of the eye should neitherirritate nor damage it), the existence of those concerns need to be addressed. Otherconcerns (often based on scenes from Hollywood movies) are expressed about physicalsafety (criminals might cut off fingers or rip out eyeballs to overcome biometric