26 January, 2010
category: Biometrics, Government
Biometric ID cards have recently received heat for whether they truly are the best security solution to identity theft. In an article on timesofmalta.com, the biometric ID card is compared to standard credit cards in terms of vulnerability and risk to data breaching.
The biometrics are electronically read and converted to a sequence of ones and zeros and sent to an authenticator to be compared with the sequence on file in the database. The argument remains how a series of numbers on a credit card, which has been stolen many a time, is all that different from a series of numbers making up a digital fingerprint.
Debaters are taking it a step further to say that while credit card companies have the ability to issue someone a new card number, an individual can’t exactly get new fingerprints if their information is stolen.
Protests in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the U.K. have deterred plans for ID card introduction. Current plans were predicting more than 85% of the worlds would utilize biometric documentation by 2012.