WG2 Emerging applications: access control, commercial services, surveillance
With governmental applications as the major driver, biometrics is used and will be used in an increasing number of applications. The network will focus on three main areas of applications:
Access Control
The already well-established biometric access control applications for critical areas will soon proliferate into many other areas where controlled access is required. This may range from leisure sites to public transportation systems and other “ticket driven” applications. These types of applications may usually have less stringent security requirements compared to passports but may, nonetheless, have an impact on the latter due to the usage of the same type of biometrics.
An important development in this area is the movement of physical access control towards logical access control. This ‘merge’ of the physical with the digital world means an extension of the legally controllable boundaries and an increasing risk of identity theft and identity fraud. Also extending access control with time & attendance functionalities is causing a lot of debate at DPAs (Data Protection Authorities) in Europe and abroad about the proportionality of such applications.
Now these applications are emerging in the commercial market space tools for assessing the trade off between costs (financial, privacy) and benefits (financial, convenience, security) are needed more than ever before.
Commercial Services
The future will show a significant growth of “buy-through-biometrics” applications and other biometrics enabled services. However, suitable business models built on realistic cost/benefit analyses are still hard to find, although many industries are undertaking research on this. Where the price for security often is subject to political debate (the introduction of biometric passports has been a political decision), in commercial applications the added value needs to be quantified and balanced against the costs. The challenge for this category of applications is the difficulty to define the relation between costs and benefit of using biometrics (i.e. the added value of biometrics) caused by a variety of issues:
- the complications that exceptions handling and fall back procedures can cause to existing processes and procedures
- the lack of experience with biometrics for consumer applications
- uncertainty on long term cost of ownership
- costly infrastructural requirements to facilitate biometric functionalities
- uncertainty about user acceptance
Despite these challenges, several industries appear to be moving closer and closer to successful large scale business cases such as the financial services sector (e.g. vein partner recognition in ATMs, voice biometrics for electronic banking, fingerprint for “paying by touch”) and international travel (see also WG3 on European Registered Traveller schemes).
Surveillance
The span of potential applications range from positive scenarios, which improve convenience and efficiency, where regular processes cannot cope with increasing volumes and complexity, to darker scenarios, like hidden profiling, and other privacy sensitive phenomena. There is a thin line between, what really benefits the citizen, and what is, just an extra mechanism to monitor people. Technically, this encompasses mechanisms like multi-modal biometrics, including soft-biometrics, social engineering and background checking. The challenge for the future is to promote the transparent and positive type of applications and to prevent the dark scenarios that could lead to less transparency, function creep and a ‘big brother’ society.
Topics include:
- analysis of existing (non-governmental) applications
- impact for governmental Identity Management systems
- soft-biometrics
- trade off between convenience and privacy in different scenarios
- revocation, identity repair
- template protection
- biometric data management in small scale applications with closed user groups