Monday, July 24, 2017

There's a reason you should be terrified of iris scanners and iPhone facial recognition – but it's not the reason you think...

I hate passwords. I forget them, I lose them, I agonise over someone stealing them. At work, I don’t change them when the system prompts me to. I get locked out of my computer and spend hours trying to regain access. The helpdesk hates me.

I’m a queen of the caps lock blunder too: not knowing I’ve struck the pesky key, I type in my password agonisingly – two, three, four times – only to be told to “please contact a system administrator”. And that usually happens last thing on a Friday. When my patience resembles a tissue that’s been through the washing machine. Twice.

So, as someone who likes to consider themselves relatively tech-savvy and reasonably receptive to new gadgets, you may therefore think that I would take to the idea of biometric identification like a duck to water. You’d be wrong. I’m terrified. And I’m going to tell you why you too should be afraid.

Last week, high street lender TSB announced that it was becoming the first bank in Europe to introduce iris recognition on its mobile banking app, allowing you to transfer money, check your balance and make payments, quite literally, in the blink of an eye. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Researchers find flaws in police facial recognition technology...
  2. 117 million Americans in the FBI database. That’s about 50 percent...
  3. India is scanning people’s fingerprints and eyeballs to make a database...
  4. 'Faceless recognition system' can identify you even when you...
  5. Windows 10 to add facial recognition, iris scans and fingerprint reader...
  6. NSA collecting millions of faces from web images...
  7. Facial recognition: is the technology taking away your identity?
  8. Face-recognition software: Is this the end of anonymity for all of us?

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