Lets Talk About Biometrics

Biometrics means taking people's individual biological dimensions. The Nazis were leaders in biometrics prior to and during World War II, they took pictures of untold numbers of people and then classified them by their race. Your fingerprint carries your individual biometric information as does your eye and your ear. Each voice is unique and the dimensions of your face are fairly unique. If someone has all of that information then they can identify you as you.

As I discussed in my last post, if you are going to have a cashless society then you have to have a way of positively identifying who is accessing your electronic identity and electronic "cash". I am not advocating either, I am explaining where we are going and why. For a "global" economy to be truly global the belief is that we have to standardize the valuation of currencies and of nations.

The government is interested in biometrics for other reasons. They want to identify criminals and terrorist, unfortunately, they are notorious for over collecting information on everyone. Here is a link to a government website, you might try watching the video at the bottom of their page.

Biometrics.gov

The question next becomes, if we do need to have biometric information available when we go to a cashless society, who should have access to it? Should a stalker have access to it, should we all have everyone else's information so that we can scan the internet and find all the pictures of them? What about your bank and law enforcement?

What if your bank required your biometric information in order to have an account? Would you give it or go without the ability to get paid or pay bills? I received so many hits to the last post that I thought I would give some further background on the issue.

The final frontier for biometrics is DNA. Obviously your DNA is unique to you, it is also left on things that you touch from the oils in your fingers. If you have watched any detective shows you have seen DNA be used to prove who committed a crime. The FBI has a database of people's DNA and it is more and more common for jails to take your DNA if you are arrested. I wrote a while back about how IBM was making a very small and portable machine that could take and analyze your DNA.

I hope that provided some additional information. Have a great week.