Much of UK biometric passport data for archive, police use only?
Another good piece by John Lettice in The Register analyses a recent parliamentary answer by Andy Burnham:
Passports and ID cards are unlikely to actually use most the “13 biometrics” the Government proposes to collect on all citizens, which is probably just as well, because they won’t fit. But much of the biometric data that will be collected on registration will hardly ever be used. In a parliamentary answer to questioning by Lynne Jones MP last week, Home Office Minister Andy Burnham said that: “As the images [the biometric data] will not be required for routine matching and may only be used for generating the template on enrolment and subsequent biometric renewal, they could therefore be stored in a separate database which may be managed as an archive.”
Furthermore, procurement documents recently published by the Home Office show that it only expects this subset of biometrics on its proposed “gold standard” ID card data to be checked about 4 times per person per year (163m total transactions annually). As Dr Emily Finch of UEA has pointed out, an ID card that everyone trusts, but which is rarely actually checked would be a recipe for rampant identity theft. Biometrics stored in an “archive” cannot possibly help prevent fraud.
