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privacy
Ultimately, there are too many databases with people’s fingerprints out there, and my expectation is that they’re gonna leak at some point.
So that means two things:
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First, don’t use biometrics to check identity unless you’re in a position where a person forging them can actually be checked for forged biometrics and get in trouble if caught. Like, customs at an airport, where you could see if someone has fake caps on their fingers or something. Biometrics cannot normally be invalidated. If it leaks and you’re using the fingerprints to authenticate yourself to, say, your laptop or your bank or something, you can never invalidate those credentials, and people will always be able to get into your bank account. Specifically in the case of fingerprints, it’s often not even that hard to get ahold of a specific individual’s biometrics – you leave a record of them on any smooth surface that you touch.
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Second, if you’re in a position where you don’t want to leave behind a signature, you might want to wear something that masks biometrics. If you have widely-leaked biometrics databases floating around that anyone can get access to, and you, say, put your hand on something, you’ve just left a signature that anyone can map to identity. Maybe bring back gloves, say. I don’t think that we’re at a point where there are systems that can do iris scans at a distance without someone knowing. Facial recognition is definitely doable at a distance, and that happens today. People at political protests who are worried about being identified, some military people, stuff like that, will mask their face. Maybe it makes sense to roll back anti-mask laws if facial databases are gonna be floating around. I dunno about gait recognition, whether that’s sufficiently-unique to distinguish among a large number of people at a distance.
Last time I used my mandatory ID for a public transaction I actually had to use a webcam and held the card up to it and then my face so a human could check them.
Turns out, in a country where these have been in use for decades some people have put some thought into it. Go figure.
Of course now we have real time deepfakes and that is again obsolete, so we’ll see where we go from here. I hope I don’t have to bring my meatsuit to an actual office for routine tax transactions again, because that sucked and this is better.
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Yeah, I’m saying that unironically. Depending on the transaction you’re trying to make it can require a digital certificate you acquired previously in person, but it can also be human-verified in real time by checking your ID and matching it over videoconferencing.
The person checking my ID would have had to check my ID if I went to the office in person, too. Because, you kmow, they were gating my accessing my own private data. So remote human verification isn’t “invasive”, it’s literally the same thing we would have done in person without the hassle of going to the office, which helps people who can’t move around easily and during the pandemic it also kept everybody else safe.
It’s fascinating how consistently the anglosphere assumes identifying yourself is an attack rather than a service. My ID has just as many protection features as my money, and that’s how I want it, because my ID gates people being able to act in my name and access my records in a number of ways. Reliable, universal ID is a feature, not a bug.
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Eh… I think now you’re having an argument with somebody in your head.
I don’t care how you wank, friend. Wank away.
I showed my face over a webcam next to my official ID to access tax data or medical records. I sure expect identity to be verified for those things, on site or remotely. If your government is not checking your identity to access your private data, how the hell is that working? If you don’t think the health care system should keep your medical records or the tax system should keep your tax records, how do you think those services can work?
Is this one of those things where you got angry about a thing once and now there is no room for nuance or compromise on it online? Because I get that people think privacy is important, but maybe it’s time to just say out loud once that “privacy” doesn’t mean “nothing I ever do leaves a trace anywhere, ever”, which is an absurd statement.
Could you explain what non invasive methods exist? Really would like to hear them.
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Europe mostly gets it right. Then this.
Again, 1984 was a warning, not a handbook!
We’ve had fingerprints in our ID cards for decades.
It’s fine. Quite useful, really. Less of a totalitarian state now than when they were introduced, actually.
I know in the anglo world the whole national ID card thing is seen as intrusive, but it’s kinda fine. I just know my number, which is great for some transactions, and I can get right by airport security without interacting with any humans just by tapping my biometric ID on a reader. Plus it can be upgraded to a full on digital signature certificate, although the implementation is terrible and I hate it.
Almost all the passports around the world include biometric as well.
How so?
Well, right now my government (Germany) doesnt have any of my fingerprints.
But the US has all 10 fingers because i visited once.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) said the 2019 regulation was in line with fundamental rights to respect for private life and the protection of personal data.
A German court in the western city of Wiesbaden asked ECJ to review the validity of an EU regulation calling for two fingerprints to be stored on an individual’s identity card after a German challenged the city’s decision to deny him a new identity card if he did not provide his fingerprints.
The ECJ justified its decision saying fingerprints on IDs were important in the prevention of identity theft and the interoperability of verification systems.
The court ruled that the benefits of such a system made it compatible with the right to respect for private life and the protection of personal data.
The court additionally said that a facial image can be inefficient, as a face can change due to illness, aging, lifestyle, and surgery.
Some civil rights activists were disappointed with the court’s decision, arguing that other options could be explored to combat identity theft.
The original article contains 227 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 29%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is a good ruling.
Now if only they’d scrap the ones against CCTV and facial recognition, we can build a safer society without street crime.
We’ve had biometic Id for ages, it hasn’t impacted street crime much one way or the other.
Lower inequality and a safety net, thought? Does wonders.
