The Politics of Biometrics: A Shibboleth

Telegraph.co.uk - Children, 4, 'to be fingerprinted to borrow school books from library'

Anyone who terms the implementation of a fingerprint biometric system as described in this article as designed to help libraries serve their customers more efficiently "the fingerprinting of children" is either confused or or lacks respect for their audience.

"Fingerprinting" conjures up images of prison movies, the "rolled ten" and the loss of personal freedom. The fingerprinting process in the usage above is not undertaken in order to further the interests of the person providing the fingerprints. It is typically undertaken to help protect society from the person behind the fingers and carries with it a social stigma. Biometric alarmists intentionally and wrongly bring all of "fingerprinting's" social baggage and dump it onto fingerprint identity management systems.

Besides being misleading, the use of the term "fingerprinting" isn't technically accurate in this case, either. As with the fingerprints we all leave everywhere everyday, the only fingerprint that exists in the system described in the article will reside on the surface of the sensor and only until the next person uses it. According to Lesley Isherwood, the school headmaster, neither the fingerprint nor the image of the fingerprint is stored in a database.

What happens is this: A person places their finger on a sensor. The sensor reads the fingerprint and software turns the fingerprint into a unique number. For the software to work, the same finger has to be converted into the same number every time. It's the numbers that are stored, not images of the fingerprint.

This approach makes sense for a lot of reasons. First and foremost you can't lose data you don't have and no school administrator (risk averse lot that they rightfully are) wants to explain how they lost a bunch of kids' biometric information. Also, in a software environment, numbers are easier to work with than images. Moreover, most adults are rightfully protective of the innocence of children and are pretty conservative when making choices on their behalf.

Of course, an article with the headline: Children, 4, 'to be fingerprinted to borrow school books from library' is bound to have some choice quotes from a Biometric Alarmist:

“This is quite clearly appalling,” said Phil Booth, national coordinator of NO2ID, a privacy campaign group.

To be fair to NO2ID, judging by their web presence, Mr. Booth would appear to be one of the group's more committed members. The group itself seems to be pretty moderate in trying to raise issues of individual liberty and its relationship to the state in the context of digital identity management in a country (the UK) famous for its government surveillance systems. Nevertheless, the school library's system is far from self-evidently appalling. Thankfully, Mr. Booth provides some guidance for those who need some help becoming appalled.

“For such a trivial issue as taking out of library books the taking of fingerprints is way over the top and wrong.

If the taking out of library books is trivial, why not just close the library? And please don't take the child's fingerprints, she'll need those to get lunch.

“It conditions children to hand over sensitive personal information.”

No it doesn't; It conditions children that they must identify themselves to an organization in exchange for enjoying the services that organization offers. The fingerprint authentication is a substitute for a signature or an item with an attached bar code and it's not particularly sensitive.

A signature (which many 4-year-old's are unable to provide) is perhaps more sensitive than a number representing a fingerprint. Just think of the risks under the old signature-card-in-the-book-cover regime. Anyone who ever checked out a book after you could potentially forge your signature.

The use of ID cards with bar codes, an alternate identification method used by libraries, also poses a risk to the child's sensitive information in the event the cards become lost.

I do agree that children (adolescents and, alas, adults too) need quite a lot of guidance in keeping their privacy. See facebook, sexting, You Tube, etc. Something in the society is definitely conditioning young people to treat their privacy in ways that are shocking to some, but I don't think elementary school libraries are the culprit.

“The money for such a system could be spent on actual school resources. How about some more books for the library instead?"

A penny saved is a penny earned. Books are no different. One might hope that the identification system in use will prevent more books from being lost over time. It would then be up to the school to decide how to invest the savings. With the reduced risk of loss, perhaps they will buy more books. Rather than replacing lost volumes the library might even expand the number of titles they are able to offer.

“This needs to be rolled back or stopped. I would argue there is no justification for such a scheme.

There is obvious justification for such a scheme:

1. It gives the library the ability to more efficiently serve its stakeholders by reducing transactions costs.
2. It eliminates the necessity of a token (card). It is expensive to replace lost cards. Lost cards may be used by others. Those who have lost their cards will borrow others'. Children lose things.
3. Reduced loss of library books, leading to a better library.
   
4. It is a system that is so easy that, apparently, even 4-year-old's can use it.
   

Perhaps Mr. Booth means that the justifications are insufficient to overcome his objections. I would be very interested to hear his argument in more detail than is given in the article.

UK to streamline privacy police?

Privacy groups demand one commissioner to rule them all (The Register)

The UK needs a single privacy commissioner, and not the tangle of officials it is creating to police the area, an alliance of pressure groups claimed yesterday.

Terri Dowty, Director of Action on Rights for Children (ARCH), warned of the uncoordinated and ineffective proliferation of commissioners now operating in this area. Dowty made the call on behalf of a number of other campaign groups, including Privacy International, Genewatch UK and NO2ID.

Public bureaucrats called privacy commissioners always seem a little paternalistic.

My kind of privacy commissioner would hand out fines to people loudly discussing their private lives on their mobiles in public places rather than trying to inject themselves into the privacy decisions best left to the rough-and-tumble of individual informed consent.

If the surveillance state has gotten too big, why not just roll it back rather than creating an entirely new innovation-limiting bureaucracy?

Nevertheless, the changes proposed in the article represent a step toward a more rational system.

Transcript: Tweet Chat on Biometric Technology 10/06/11

Subject: Privacy
The discussion, moderated by M2SYS, with James Baker of NO2ID dealt with the issue: Biometrics & Privacy.

Click image to view chat

Debating biometrics [Introduction]

I read with interest and optimism the guest post written by NO2ID's James Baker for the M2SYS blog last week: Interest because the people at M2SYS seem to share our belief that biometric identity management techniques have been a force for good in the world far more than they have led to ill; Optimism because I hope there is a common intellectual and philosophical space that technology providers and those who worry about biometrics can inhabit.

Over the course of a series of posts we will be examining the appropriate role of privacy campaigners in the adoption of biometric identity management technologies.

Part I: The Right to Privacy
Part II: The Nature of Consent
Part III: Transparency
Part IV: A Framework for the Discussion of Privacy Issues
Part V: Filling in the framework; Absolute advocacy dos and don'ts
Part VI: Filling in the framework, subjectivity and interpretation

Waiting for the kitchen sink

Biometric Smart ID Cards: Dumb Idea — Every anti-biometrics argument in one convenient resource, including NO2ID, and the horribly mischaracterized Israel "biometrics" data breach.

Data Don't Have Feelings

This is an odd way to spin a fire at a server farm...

Fire at UID data centre, 20cr citizens' data at risk (Times of India)

The data centre on the third floor is a small subset of the main data centre in Bangalore, said the spokesman.

"Little data was being stored here. Nonetheless, no data is harmed as we have a back up at 3-4 locations across the country," the spokesman said.

So as not to single out the Times of India, it's worth noting that the Economic Times is running essentially the same article.

My question is how exactly, as asserted in the headline, is citizen data at risk?

Only two possibilities make sense.

The first possibility is that the data is at risk of being lost, deleted or destroyed by fire. If that's the case the "risk" is that all the staff work and the effort of those who waited in line to get an ID is wasted. But since it's backed up at 3-4 locations, that's not the case.

The other possibility is that is is less secure because of the fire, but burning data and/or destroying hardware doesn't make it less secure in the sense that it can be abused, it makes it more secure in the sense that it is useless. Even NO2ID knows that.

Another funny quote from the article...

"The accident puts a big question mark over safety of data being collected from about 1.2 billion Indian residents and being housed in risk prone facilities."

The only way this makes sense is if data have feelings. If they do, they might care about fire safety out of a sense of self-preservation but then again, they might not.

The Times of India and The Economic Times frequently do top-rate work on UID. This article is just strange. Fun, but strange.