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13 January 2003 |
Americans give thumbs up to biometrics: Phone survey found that whilst consumer confidence in biometrics is low, US citizens have more support for its use to prevent identity fraud.
The vast majority of those questioned agreed that a number of privacy safeguards need to be put in place if biometrics systems are to be used. These include: informed consent, people should be informed about the uses an organization will make of their biometric ID and why it is needed; a prohibition on using biometric IDs for any purpose other than those originally described to the individual and safeguards so people can have any rejection of their identity re-examined and verified.
Most of those quizzed also wanted biometric IDs to be kept apart from other personal identifiers and a ban on sharing biometric data between organisations without specific authorisation either by the individual concerned or through a mandatory legal requirement.
People should be told when biometric identifiers are being collected - except where secrecy is needed in national security situations, the majority of Americans surveyed also believe.
Elsewhere, Judith Markowitz's The For-Real Story at Speech Technology magazine gives four good case-studies of voice biometrics being used for real-world applications.
Residential Access Security: [...] The technology is text independent which eliminates the need for codes or passwords. To enter a perimeter door a resident inserts an ID card into a slot, presses a button, and talks for 1 ½ seconds saying anything they want, including, “This is Mary Smith. I'd like to get into my apartment.” A far-field array microphone above the door captures the voice of the person standing by the card reader. ID cards are not needed for entry to their apartments, but speaker authentication is.
[...]
Secure Login: [...] In 1999, when Mitel decided to move forward with speech technology for voice-activated dialing, unified messaging, and other applications they knew speaker verification had to be included. "When you give users access to a dialer you have to have security and when you’re talking about unified messaging you’re talking about highly-sensitive data which is in e-mail," explains Steve Duncan, Mitel’s CEO. Employees enroll and verify with their 10-digit, log-in code. If, after three attempts, a caller's voice doesn't match the voiceprint for that code they are transferred to a human agent.
Two of them use two authentication tokens (voice verification plus ID card, voice verification plus 10-digit ID number), though interestingly the elderly-citizen residential complex case-study uses a firewall model of security: voice verification plus ID card at the perimeter doors, and voice verification only at the apartment door (what happens if you have laryngitis?). Other second tokens could include passphrases or passphrase-on-request. (Related: VoiceVault recently won accredited certification under EU Directive 1999/93/EC on Electronic Signatures using biometrics for their voice verif plus numbers system.)
We have difficulty seeing voice biometrics applications get significant success unless they use two tokens because it is too hard to cost-effectively deal with a forgot-password or a bad-voiceprint situation. For instance, what do you do if there's a false negative? How does a caller prove they are who they say they are? You drop out to a call-centre - as is done in one of Markowitz's case-studies. Maybe Judith can show us where we're wrong?
More worryingly for biometrics as a whole, we still don't see how you can issue a new identity if your current ID (voice, thumb, face etc) has been compromised through, say, digital theft. This seems to be an important question for the biometric industry to answer.
4:17:14 PM 
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Clay Shirky asks whether technology like RSS and social constructs/ideas like the Lazyweb will provide open-source software efforts with the same kind of lever for feature development that numbers-of-developers-on-net provided for bug-fixing (this is not to say that open-source hasn't created software with great features, merely that feature dev in large, distributed teams seems a harder challenge than bug-barbecuing)
3:48:50 PM
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Upside down and rotated world maps
3:48:24 PM
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Design your room, it'll generate isometric and print views and a 3D walkthrough. Brilliant.
3:47:27 PM
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Converts formatted text into standards-compliant html. You need to know its easy markup language... But - O for something you could paste in from Word.
3:46:22 PM
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No matter what the state of the economy, toy makers generally do pretty well -- after all, kids don't give a rat's ass if Lucent missed their third quarter projections by 7/15 of a cent, all they know is they need a Fashion Polly Sparkle Style House and, by God, they need it NOW! That's what gave me Great Idea #57709: the US should make the four pronged square Lego the standard unit of US currency.
12:39:41 PM
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© Copyright 2003 rodcorp.
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