Which Biometric ?
 

There seems to be a lot of debate on what sort of biometrics should be introduced into airports for (a) airline/airport staff ID's and access control and also (b) for passenger checks.

Options appear to be finger prints, palm prints, iris scans, face recognition, voice recognition etc. Interested to know what you all think you would be prepared to be subjected to and what you think the pax should be subjected to.

For accuracy by the way it looks like iris scans are best but slow and with little data whereas fingerprints seem a good compromise between speed and accuracy, and face recognition is the least intrusive of all.....

I'm a SLF working as an Internet security consultant. Biometrics are useful in two areas:

1. Verification - in which you identify yourself as "John Smith" and then the biometric matches your physical characteristics against a database. Iris scanning is the front runner for this technology (cheap, quick and accurate) and is currently under trial in several airports in Europe and the U.S. Finger/hand recognition faces some consumer resistance in that people are nervous of having their fingerprints on a central database (even though the technology does not check actual fingerprints, only a few of their distinguishing charcteristics).

2. Identification - in which the biometric system scans everyone looking for known bad guys. Face recognition is an obvious technology for this purpose since most lounges will already have CCTV surveillance systems. This technology is rapidly improving, but still prone to false positives.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your answer. The thing I wa smore interested in was which sort of Biometric aircrew would be prepared to use comfortably and what they would expect the pax to use?

Good point you raise though about Europe going after iris scanning and US fingerprint/faces ? Wonder why that is and how they can reconcile two different databases ?

Sorry StagN8 - that was meant to be a new sentence starting after U.S.

To clarify, both US and Europe are likely to use iris scanning for verification (IMHO). Users of the system (to begin with at least) will pay a $100 fee to be scanned and their details placed on a smartcard (like a credit card with a computer chip inside it). So at present it's mainly a way of avoiding queuing for immigration/passport checks (like the fast-track procedure at JFK/EWR).