Christa Carpentiere

Cool and yet a little scary

The lockers at the re-opened Statue of Liberty are keyed off of fingerprints now - the Biometric tech puts ID at your fingertips  article on CNN details the project. I have to say, I'd love to hear more about the application that handles translating, storing, & serving up the biometric data. Sounds like we can expect to see more of this kind of thing, which on one hand has that whole cool “the future is now” kind of vibe. On the other hand, despite the fact that they state they won't share the personal info, I'm not really crazy about having my fingerprints (even the “hash“ of one as per the article), retina scans, etc going into a database somewhere where I have no say as to how long it stays there, how securely it is held, whether they decide to share that data down the road, that kind of thing. I'd hope to see privacy policies evolve for acquired biometric data like they have for Web sites, telling me exactly what they plan to do with it and what my options are if I don't like what they propose. After all, it's bad enough that it seems everyone and their brother requires my SSN to provide any kind of service to me, I don't want them to start demanding DNA samples or something like that :)

posted Wednesday, August 25, 2004 2:05 PM by christac