DailyMail.co.uk
Cutting-edge cameras will scan drivers' faces and check them against a crime database as they enter car parks, it emerged last night.
NCP, which is trialling the system at 40 sites, hopes it will help identify potential car thieves.
But privacy campaigners reacted with fury, saying the technology could criminalise innocent people.
Forgiving the unfortunate phrasing of the last quoted sentence (I'm not sure it's technically possible to "criminalise innocent people"), this article makes several points of which would-be consumers of biometric identity management systems should be aware.
1. There are people who are extremely suspicious of these systems and they aren't very moderate in their assessment of the motives of those who install these systems.
2. The non-technical press seeks out and amplifies the point of view of those who are suspicious of these systems.
Given 1 and 2 above, adopters of biometrically-enabled identity management systems should make sure that they are in a position to explain why they are doing what they are doing. They should be able to communicate how the accompanying improvements in business processes benefit the business's bottom line and improve the value proposition the business is able to offer to its customers. This post offers a great example. This quote from the linked article falls a bit short:
Lee Holland, the company's regional director, said: 'We hope that our customers will view this as a positive move to help improve the security we offer at our car parks.
'Our aim is to help customers to feel comfortable that they are parking in an environment which is extra-vigilant when it comes to dealing with the small minority involved in car crime.'
"I hope this makes you feel safer" isn't likely to compensate the customer for the extra cost of the system which will show up in the price of the parking service or the inevitable inconvenience associated with false positive and/or false negative identifications.
As a practical matter, the technical and public relations challenges are much easier when these systems are applied to managing the identities of staff rather than customers. As a parking garage customer, I might derive some benefit from the knowledge that all garage staff were thoroughly vetted using state of the art ID management techniques while the inconvenience associated with that task falls upon someone else. If you're going to use those tools on me, your customer, I will require compensation.
I guess it's possible that the problem NCP is trying to solve is that its customers are stealing from each other at an unacceptable rate. It's also possible that the thieves are a small minority of NCP customers and that NCP has good quality photos of these people for use in the facial recognition database. But if these things are true, why not just come out and say it?
I'd like to offer a few caveats to the above analysis:
It is possible that the linked article is not meant to be fair and that the article does Lee Holland and NCP a disservice. I have accepted the article at face value (no pun intended). If taking the article at face value was a poor decision on my part, the part of my analysis dealing with NCP and Lee Holland is bound to be off. Nevertheless, if my analysis is wrong because the article is unfair, the points made in the first half of this post are buttressed rather than undermined.
