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MAIN BIOMETRICS AREAS AND EXAMPLES OF APPLICATIONS
Entering facilities and conducting transactions of all sorts, from boarding an airplane to cashing a check, increasingly depend on establishing identity quickly and accurately.
Biometrics helps validating personal identity through enrolled user programs, access control and ID verification systems, on-line scanners, cell phones, PDAs and other digital equipment.
Three Main Areas
• Physical Access Control
A common use of biometrics is to control physical access to sensitive buildings and sites. Many different biometric technologies are used alone or in combination to ensure that only authorized persons gain entry to secured facilities. Unlike passwords that can be stolen or forgotten, or photo IDs that can be forged, biometrics are reliable and virtually foolproof.
• Time & Attendance
Employers want to be sure that their employees are on site and doing their jobs when they are supposed to be. Using biometrics to verify time and attendance does away with “buddy punching”, in which one employee punches in an absent employee’s time card.
Employees benefit from biometric verification as well, because biometrics help safeguard their time and attendance records against employers’ manipulation or mistakes.
• IT Security
Biometrics plays a key role in ensuring that IT devices, from computers to cell phones, respond only to authorize users. Biometrically-enabled devices can verify and authorize one or more users without the need for easily stolen or forgotten passwords. Institutions that employ from five to 50 thousand employees, whether working on site or at remote locations, can secure their IT networks through a variety of biometric technologies.
Application Examples
Financial Transactions
Identity theft is the fastest-growing white-collar crime. A leading solution is the deployment of biometrics to authenticate personal identity in order to safeguard financial transactions. Applications include the use of biometrics to access ATMs, conduct on-line banking, and authenticate identity at point-of- sale in retail stores.
Schools (K-12)
A key aim is to prevent unauthorized persons from gaining entry to school facilities.
Biometrics is also being used to see that children access school computers under controlled conditions and to make sure students entitled to subsidized meals receive them at the cafeteria, also preventing the rest of the students from carrying money or cards to pay for their lunch by using internet pre-paid systems that allow children to charge their accounts using just their fingerprints.
Colleges & Universities
Biometrics is in growing use in colleges and universities give individual students, faculty, and staff the sufficient identification to control access to classrooms, dormitories, and libraries. In addition, IT networks in colleges and universities are being protected by biometric devices, with the added benefit of reducing the costs of administering computer passwords.
Health Care
Biometrics can be a matter of life and death in health care. Biometrics can establish personal identity from the moment patients enter the care of a physician or medical facility, and that identity can be transmitted accurately and securely throughout the health care system. Biometrics are used to ensure that only authorized medical personnel can access sensitive hospital facilities, such as nurseries and operating rooms, to see to it that prescribed medications are delivered to the proper patients, and to safeguard the privacy of patients’ medical records by assuring that only authorized personnel can view them.
Transportation
Few sectors of the economy are as complex as transportation. Trucking, rail travel, aviation, and shipping have begun to use biometrics to make sure that transport employees of all kinds – especially key personnel like drivers, engineers, pilots, and ships’ officers and seamen – are who they claim to be, and that they are authorized to access the transport system. Truck drivers who pick up containers at seaports, for example, are being biometrically screened to authenticate their identities and make sure they pick up the right shipments. Biometrics are also being used to verify that operators of heavy transportation equipment are not exceeding time limits on working hours. Digital manifests are being linked with biometrically-identified drivers to prevent theft and tampering. In the future, biometrics and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems will be used together to identify, tag, and track shipments and people throughout integrated transportation networks.
Voter Registration
Establishing the identity of registered voters is vital to help deter voter fraud and thus increase confidence that elections can’t be stolen. Biometrics can play a key role in authenticating the identity of voters at the registration booth, at polling places, and not least in online voting, where no good means of authenticating identity exists apart from biometrics.
Gaming
The gaming industry has a particular interest in establishing and ensuring identities by the use of biometrics. In casino cash rooms and other operations centers, only individuals whose identities have been examined and verified can be admitted. With millions of dollars potentially at stake, impersonators are not welcome. On casino floors, cheaters who may be caught once and tossed out can be identified biometrically and their records circulated to other casinos, thus discouraging them from trying to defraud one casino after another.
Police & Public Safety
Most people don't realize that biometrics have been an important police and security tool for over 150 years. The fingerprint was recognized early as a unique biometric, and has been central to criminal identification and identity verification. In the past, however, fingerprints had to be captured with ink on paper in central booking stations, sent by mail, courier or fax to repositories to be analyzed by experts, a process that takes hours or days. Now fingerprints have been joined by other biometrics, and new technologies allow biometrics to be captured in the field, for example by police on the beat. These data may be transmitted and compared instantly to vast databases, allowing the cop on the beat to identify a deadbeat dad, escaped felon, or international terrorist.
Immigration
Just as biometrics are being deployed to authenticate the identity of temporary visitors to the U.S. and other countries, biometrics are also being used to verify the identity of immigrants. Biometrics is being collected as part of the routine background investigation of applicants for immigration and asylum in order to insure that individuals are who they claim to be.
Border Control
Authenticating the identity of travelers who want to cross international borders is a vital means of strengthening security in the age of terror. In coming years, a majority of nations worldwide will require their own citizens and foreign visitors to present biometrically-enabled border-crossing documents, meaning passports or visas or both, upon entry and exit. In the U.S., the US-VISIT program began capturing the biometrics of foreign visitors in early 2005. US-VISIT has succeeded in identifying and deterring potential terrorists and led to the capture of criminals sought by law enforcement agencies.
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