Unrecognised irises
According to the New Scientist “Feedback” column:
THE UK government remains hell-bent on introducing biometric identity cards. We have to wonder how many of the civil servants behind the scheme have tried using the iris-recognition technology the government introduced a year ago to make it quicker to get through passport control at UK airports and which Feedback reported on at the time (14 April 2007).
A colleague who regularly travels abroad has gamely persevered with the iris scheme. He leaves his friends waiting to show paper passports in the immigration line and joins the iris line. Then he enters a cubicle, looks into a camera and obeys synthesised voice instructions to stand further back, closer, to the left, to the right and so on.
The iris line is always short or empty because very few passengers now bother to try it. Most of those who do are routinely rejected. The camera and computer spend several minutes trying to recognise the traveller’s eyes before saying no. The reject then has to back out of the cubicle and return to the line to show paper.
March 28th, 2008 at 16:51
All I have got to say is good — ha ha haaa! I half suspected that this might happen. On a more serious note, the 2 e mails sent to the times or the telegraph a couple of years ago were dead right they predicted that the technology would not tbe right until 2026. But, of course it begs the question what do we all do then when Big Brother is on the march?