Forwarded From: Aleph One <aleph1@nationwide.net>
http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/UPDATES/lat_bio0429.htm
Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, April 29, 1998
Not All See Eye to Eye on Biometrics
Security: Lower prices may bring fingerprint or iris
scanners to the corner bank or market. Critics fear loss of privacy
and theft of the information.
By ERIC SLATER, Times Staff Writer
In the papillary loops and whorls on the human fingertip, one of
nature's lovelier and more mystical truths kept itself hidden for
eons. Only a century ago did scientists discover that no two
fingerprints are alike.
In recent decades, science has learned that the rest of the human
body is equally uniquethe scattered specks of color in the eye, the
timbre and tenor of a voice, the gradations of heat rising from a
face.
Wilma Jean Tinto of Century Bank scans her fingerprint on the ID system.
For years, though, devices designed to recognize such minute anatomical
signaturesfrom facial thermographs to body odor sensorswere found mostly
in Defense Department laboratories, spy novels and movies.
Now, with increasingly accurate and affordable biometric devices
beginning to appear in such unexotic places as suburban banks, welfare
offices and grocery stores, their practical applications are finally
being tested.
So, too, are issues of security and privacy, with the frontier of
civil liberties likely to move beyond random drug testing to include
the fingerprinting of employees and the electronic mapping of
automated teller machine customers' eyeballs. Such practices, critics
suggest, could violate laws governing everything from search and
seizure to equal protection.
A California Assembly bill seeks to regulate the use of biometric
devices and datathe first such proposed legislation in the country.
Supported by the unlikely alliance of the nonprofit Center for Law in
the Public Interest and the California Bankers Assn., the bill would
make trafficking in biometric information a crime and, among other
things, mandate that if a bank installs, say, fingerprint scanners, it
must put them in all branches, not just those in poor neighborhoods.
[snip...]
-o-
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Received on Mon May 4 11:26:31 1998