As AI gains traction and intrudes into all facets of our lives, biometric signatures are a way forward. Convenience, efficiency, and heightened security are the ruses that nudge us to accept them, but risks keep lurking closer and closer than we can imagine.
Moral issues keep raising red flags about depending upon facial and palm biometric signatures to make ends meet. This article examines the pros and cons of biometric signatures replacing manual ones.
From facial to palm biometric signatures, the race is on to tame inconvenience, inefficiency, insecurity, and wicked intruders into our private lives.
With your permission, most gadgets are testing what types of biometric signatures to adopt. Your consent is key to their goal of making life easier for their clients without compromising their security and privacy. All this is done without the reassurance of consequences whenever nobler goals are violated.
So far, there are no financial remedies to cover fraud victims once it strikes home. As we know, no system is perfect despite efforts to achieve it.
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The delightful convenience promises to remove the hassles of carrying your phone with you or a wallet to complete transactions like buying groceries in a supermarket, clearing your medical bills, or paying your travel fare. No problem, your palm or your face will be powered to do all that.
The comfort of deploying biometric signatures such as facial features or your palm is to ensure that only you can carry out those instructions, not any impostor.
Past efforts to achieve the same through left or right thumb were not secured because the signatures then lacked what digital-savvy techs call a lack of “liveliness.” Adopting AI-powered signatures will be able to distinguish if the payer or a traveller passing through immigration gates anywhere in the world is real, not an impostor.
The AI gadgets will be able to discern if you are alive by measuring your temperature, blood circulation, and heartbeats, while fake palms or faces will be singled out and denied acceptance.
Deep fakes also attempt to breach the powerful gadgets behind biometric signatures, making it a race against time and ingenuity.
Credit cards can stay at home without barring you from accessing your bank or credit accounts. Improvements in AI recognition prowess have made all this possible. Thieves like the one recorded recently in Nigeria will be a thing of the past.
In Nigeria, a rich sugar daddy married a young, sizzling woman who murdered him for his money. To seize his accounts, she chopped off his thumb and used it to fleece his accounts for weeks before authorities caught up with her.
All these were made possible because relic digital biometric signatures were not sophisticated enough to foil that kind of theft.
Recent developments have added a new twist by introducing biometric signatures that can take more human data that confirms beyond a shred of doubt the accounts’ owner is not fake. That murdered sugar daddy could not have authorized the emptying of his accounts with a dead thumbprint.
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Deep fake has also been doing some catch-up of its own. Deep fake perceives new functionalities available in the latest biometric features as a challenge to be overcome sooner rather than later. While convenience is welcome, in certain circumstances, it poses a challenge.
For example, you may not want to shop yourself and may ask someone else to do it for you. In such a situation, your biometric signature becomes an annoyance you wish you could easily resolve.
Whoever you want to do your buying chores will not be able to pay with your palm because their biometric signatures are not linked to your bank account or your credit card.
In that situation, you will need to buy online and inform courier services to pick it up for you, or, where applicable, the collector of your goods will be permitted to do it on your behalf. It is not without bother. The hunger to read, record and store biometric data from our bodies knows no boundaries.
Other companies and governments also plan to use our signatures for good causes, such as training AI to be as humane as possible.
Whether this will be achieved with our consent is anybody’s guess. Whether the holders of our biometric data will seek our permission or will fake hacking scams to justify how they lost our data is as foggy today as possible.
How vacuumed biometric data will eventually be used remains a niggling issue. Past harvesting of biometric data such as fingerprints was stored in your phone and was not shared elsewhere.
But new technologies demand public sharing of data to free us from being hooked to our phones, wallets, and credit cards.
Once data is squeezed from us, it is stored in the cloud, where it is said to be safe, but we all know practicality is another matter altogether.
When you set up Face ID on an iPhone, Apple captures a map and infrared image of your face and converts them into a mathematical code stored only on the device.
When you unlock your iPhone with your face, the phone’s sensors reread your face, checking the new code against the code stored to see if it’s a match. Ta-da! You’re in.
Facial recognition technology identifies or verifies individuals by their unique facial features. It is used in security, law enforcement, and increasingly in other applications. A camera captures an image of a person’s face, which software analyzes to identify key facial features.
The software converts those features into a unique digital code called a faceprint or signature. Some facial recognition systems compare your faceprint with a database of other faceprints, like those in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Traveler Verification Service. If a match is found, a face is identified.
In some airport security checkpoints, immigration officers, like the TSA, do something like this: A camera snaps your picture and compares it with the one on your ID to make sure it’s the same person.
That all happens before you—and the images are immediately deleted. TSA’s Touchless Identity Solution is more futuristic. You look at the camera, and it tells the agent you’re good to go—no ID is required.
For this to work, the TSA needs background information that you’ve already shared. When you step up to the camera, the system tries to match your live self with that stored image of you.
Assuming there’s a match, you proceed without showing your ID. The live and stored images are deleted within 24 hours of your flight’s departure. It’s probably apparent that the TSA’s face-matching system can’t be fooled by an evildoer who holds a photo of you to their face.
The agent would know something is up. That’s the advantage that comes with biometric reading in a public place, analysts say. “It’s not something where somebody is likely to spoof because you’re in a store paying for stuff,” says Maxine Most, chief executive of Acuity Market Intelligence, a technology consulting firm focused on biometrics and digital identity.
But even if no human minders are nearby, these systems generally use “liveness” detection, looking at motion, depth, texture and other factors. It even works for palm prints:
When you hold a photo of your hand above the sensor at pay checking point with such digital devices, the system wouldn’t recognize it. Liveness detection works fairly well in these environments, provided someone hasn’t crafted an Ethan Hunt-grade face mask of you.
However, security analysts say facial recognition might not be as useful in the future, particularly in online situations where one doesn’t have to be seen in person. AI-generated deep fakes are getting more sophisticated, mimicking facial expressions, blinking patterns, and micromovements.
Research firm Gartner predicted in February that by 2026, about 30% of enterprises won’t rely on identity verification alone due to AI-generated deep fake attacks.
While you can generally trust reputable institutions and tech companies with handling your biometric data, they aren’t entirely immune to data breaches, inaccurate readings, or some kind of advanced hack we have yet to see.
The efficiency and convenience provided by these latest contraptions outweigh fears of our biometric data falling into the wrong hands or being misused, as the regulatory framework is being thrashed out to deter such digitised malfeasance.
As the digital world continues to enslave us, we should not be surprised to find that we have no choice but to oblige or be left out of the goods and services we desire to purchase and enjoy. Weirdly, though, what was envisioned in Revelation is getting uncomfortably closer home than we can imagine.
In chapters 13:16-18 of the Book of Revelation, we were forewarned that as the world nears its demise, Satan, also called the Devil or the Deceiver, will convince us to adopt a demonic mark either on our brows or in our hands.
We shall not be able to buy or sell anything unless we are marked to be subservient to the fallen Angel. Those ethical and spiritual riveting concerns will pop up as facial and palm biometric features assume a significant role in the human race’s survival.
Are technological triumphs playing in the deceitful hands of the deceiver? We may have to answer this question in the near future.
