Report - Guardian

176 The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005scanners). The other key category of concern is related to hidden identification andtracking of individuals. For the biometrics proposed for the ID card, this appliesparticularly to face recognition.FingerprintingAccording to the NPL/BTexact study, there are still significant fears about the use offingerprinting.“One senior UK fingerprint examiner with many years of experiencein the front line of police activities mentioned that many householderswho had been burgled refused to be fingerprinted to eliminate theirown prints from those of a burglar – in spite of assurances about thedestruction of their data after use. In a deployment in the USA,however, we were told that assurances of limitation of use weresufficient to gain the trust of the participants.” 432The sense of criminalisation is one of the larger obstacles to the wide-spread use offingerprints, particularly on the scale envisioned by the UK Government involving anational registry that can be used by the police for watch-listing.There are two key points concerning fingerprinting that are likely to compromise thegovernment’s objectives. The first is that the proposed system is not “universal”. Asignificant number of people will not be able to use it. The GAO report concluded thatthe fingerprints of about 2 to 5 percent of people cannot be captured “because thefingerprints are dirty or have become dry or worn from age, extensive manual labor, orexposure to corrosive chemicals”.These findings are supported by the biometrics industry. BarclayCard has conceded thattrials with fingerprint biometrics proved them too unreliable as a means of verifyingidentity. People who had recently used hand cream created serious problems for thefingerprint readers, as did people with particularly hard or calloused skin, such as chefs,gardeners and labourers.The GAO report raises other concerns that challenge the universal applicability ofbiometrics. It advises that comparative biometric testing has shown that:“certain ethnic and demographic groups (elderly populations, manuallaborers, and some Asian populations) have fingerprints that are moredifficult to capture than others.”Error rates in fingerprinting are both significant, and poorly understood. According to arecent review 433 of available systems, only a handful of products achieved an equal errorrate of under 3%, and the performance of most was much worse. Furthermore, it wouldbe hazardous and risky for governments to lock their core infrastructure into a singleproprietary product while both attack and defence are evolving rapidly.432 ‘Feasibility Study on the Use of Biometrics in an Entitlement Scheme’, for UKPS, DVLA, and the Home Office,by Tony Mansfield and Marek Rejman-Greene, February 2003, p. 27.433 Fingerprint Verification Competition 2004, Open Category Results: Average results over all databases,Preliminary results, http://bias.csr.unibo.it/fvc2004/results.asp.