Sir, The Identity Card Bill relies on biometrics to identify people. The three types being examined are facial geometry, fingerprints and iris prints.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was commissioned by the Home Office to assess the feasibility of these biometrics.

In the case of facial geometry, the NPL says that faces keep changing and, one to two months after registering your facial geometry, there is a 60 per cent chance that a machine will say that you are not you. “Even under relatively good conditions, face recognition fails to approach the required performance . . . facial recognition is not a feasible option.” Let us not waste any more money on facial geometry.

The NPL is more sanguine about the use of fingerprints as long as at least four — and preferably all ten — fingerprints are registered in the first place and used to verify identity thereafter. The experience of the US is that there isn’t time at border crossings to verify identity using more than two fingerprints. They have also found incompatibilities between different fingerprinting systems. The upshot is that only 1 per cent of visitors’ fingerprints are checked against the FBI database.

The reliability of iris prints, according to the NPL, is much higher than facial geometry but much lower than fingerprints. This latter is not surprising, given that we tend to have ten fingers but only two irises. There are no large-scale implementations of ID systems based on iris prints to provide evidence of performance. We simply do not know how reliable they would be in practice.

It seems inadvisable to spend any money on an ID system which relies on biometrics.

Yours
DAVID MOSS,
(Director),
Dematerialised ID Ltd (Mobile phone-based ID technology),
58 Vineyard Hill Road, SW19 7JH.
bcsl@blueyonder.co.uk
May 21.

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