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FROM EDN EUROPE: If not us, who?

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I make no claims to any sort of prescience, but you really could see this one coming. In the May issue of EDN Europe, I looked at the emerging discipline of personal-identity verification by automatic fingerprint reading, and reported on the variety of sensors that are being designed to bring this technology into widespread use (Reference 1). In the course of that article, I
remarked on the associations that are inseparable from the use of fingerprints
and how implementations of such systems should be carried out with due regard to
the ultimate users' sensitivities.

Making the front pages of the London newspapers in July was a story about an outraged parent's complaint that her child had been 'fingerprinted' at school. The primary (elementary) school had introduced a management system for its library in which students check out and return books by swiping their thumbs on a print reader. According to the newspaper article, school officials neither advised the parents that the school was introducing this system nor explained the limited nature of the data recorded or the protection afforded to that data. The offended parent contacted a civil-liberties lobbying group, and, as is often the case, the story quickly acquired momentum.

If you are shaking your head in despair over the fact that no one had properly explained the issues involved, pause a moment. Making such an explanation to people who lack a background in the engineering principles that the system involves presents a formidable challenge. These people see a mysterious gadget labeled 'fingerprint sensor.' How would you
set about explaining that the whole image of the print is not captured; that the system identifies only a few key points and makes a mathematical abstraction of the fingerprint; that this abstraction has a much smaller data set than a complete print; that you can use it only for comparison against a similar version captured at a previous time; and that you can use it neither to reconstruct a print image nor for identification against a print-image database? Could you convince the parents of a class of seven-year-olds that their offspring had not, in any real sense, been 'mass-fingerprinted'? Most of us would shrink from the task, especially in an atmosphere already charged with a degree of emotion or even hysteria.

But if we, as engineers, don't want that job, who is going to do it? As these sorts of systems become more commonplace in more and more situations, people with an understanding of their underlying technology are going to be the only ones equipped to explain them. Making a greater effort to provide an articulate and nontechnical description of what we are creating may become a much more integral part of being involved in the deployment of advanced technologies.

But, back to the primary school. Should we dismiss this incident as merely the actions of an aggrieved parent who hasn't had the technology and its safeguards sufficiently explained and a vocal civil-liberties advocate who has gratefully accepted the opportunity to leap on a passing bandwagon? That is not quite the whole story.

Read a little further into the statement by the civil-liberties pressure group, and you find a much more thoughtful (and thought-provoking) point of view: 'The use of such systems will have the effect of desensitising people to more comprehensive privacy invasion later in life...Such a process has the effect of softening children up for such initiatives as ID cards and DNA testing.' Your reaction to this statement depends greatly on your attitude to privacy matters in general. In a democratic society, there is a—probably inevitable—tension between the state's desire to track, index, file, and keep tabs on a citizen, and a citizen's desire for basic privacy. We surrender that right to privacy, to a greater or lesser extent, to facilitate the maintenance of an orderly society, but we should make each such surrender only in reasoned cases with clearly defined benefits.

So, by making kids check out library books with a thumbprint swipe, we are in danger of raising a generation who will unthinkingly surrender biometric data to any petty official who demands it. Is that a fair point or libertarian ranting? Decide for yourself. At the very least, it is a point worthy of discussion. As engineers, we cannot simply attend to the technology and leave the social dimensions to someone else.

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Author Information

style="WIDTH: 65px; HEIGHT: 100px" alt="" hspace=5 src="http://www.e-insite.net/articles/images/EDNE/20020808/Xxgphead.jpg" align=left vspace=5 border=0>Contact me at graham.prophet@rbi.co.uk.

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References

Prophet, Graham, " href="index.asp?layout=article&stt=000&articleid=CA214203&pubdate=5/2/2002">Touch and go: swapping PINs for fingerprints," EDN Europe, May 2002, pg 34.