Your body, your I.D.? Iris scans, thumbprints, hand maps and other computer technologies may make us safer and more vulnerable at the same time.

Publication: Consumer Reports

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Consumers Union of the United States, Inc.

Biometrics--automated identification gadgetry--was once the stuff of sci-fi movies. A hand placed on a pad would magically open a door on the planet Galaxos; or a scan of a face would trigger an alarm in the workshop of Despota, Duchess of Doom.

Now, however, such technologies are gradually becoming part of daily life. Children in more than a dozen school districts in Pennsylvania pay for lunch by placing a finger on a scanning pad. A computer recognizes each child and bills the appropriate account for the meal. Members of the San Antonio City Employees Federal Credit Union, in Texas, access safe-deposit boxes via hand scans. Casinos use face-recognition software to identify known cheats.

Biometrics' promise is to close the chinks in our personal- and national-security armor. By using biological traits that are unique to each individual, experts say, security systems will be able to distinguish people who are dangerous from those who are not, for example, and, potentially, to ascertain whether a person using a credit card is really entitled to do so.

But there is much in these new technologies to make consumers wary. For starters, material about our physical persons could be collected without our knowledge. Second, information residing in biometric databases may be misfiled or lost. Finally, once images like fingerprints or faces are turned into computer data, they become vulnerable to copying or theft.

FASTER THAN AN EYEBLINK

Biometric technologies have been gaining a place in security systems over the past 20 years. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, however, they began to be widely...

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