[Dave Birch] As I’ve constantly complained, what should one do if one is (broadly speaking) in favour of some form of smart identity card to bridge the worlds of physical and virtual identity, but one is (broadly speaking) against the government’s proposed system? Well, one policy might be to stop reading the newspapers and hope it will all get better. Consider, for example, the Department of Work and Pensions’ attempt to salvage a viable system from the Child Support Agency catastrophe, the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC), which adds several sticks to beat recalcitrant parents with. There is going to be a ‘name and shame’ web site, credit blacklisting, monitored curfews (possible including electronic tagging) and the confiscation of passport and/or ID card. That’s joined-up government at work, presumably. The Child Maintenance & Other Payments Bill includes powers for the CMEC to disqualify an individual from “holding or obtaining travel authorisation”, with a travel authorisation being defined as a UK passport or as “an ID card… that… has been issued to a British citizen.” This kind of predictable — and tragic (in the sense of inevitable) — mission creep is an consequence of an ill-thought out identity infrastructure that is not up to the demands of a modern society or modern economy. And even if you think that taking away some ID-related privilege is the right thing to do to a deadbeat Dad, the use of the word “confiscation” reveals the basic mindset problem: “they” won’t stop you from renewing a public key certificate, delete an application from the card, change a security level or anything else that might smack of the 21st century, “they” will confiscate the card. Hey, Parliament, I’ve got 1952 on the line and they want their ID card back…

Technorati Tags: ID cards, management

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[Dave Birch] I’ve been reflecting on a very thought-provoking post on Linkdump. It concerns the attempts by some governments to stop ‘unlawful betting practices’ by demanding that the banks that execute the payments block them. Now, obviously, I don’t want to get into the moral or political aspects of this issue (which are not the concern of the Forum or this blog) but I do want to draw your attention to Linkdump’s perspective:

Well, if we go down this road and allow our governments to dictate which payments which customers may send/acccept (and instruct our banks to act accordingly), we may as well make the Treasuries our single national payment institution. This is what in my view will happen.

Interesting idea. And once we have smart national ID cards, is may become an irresistible attractor for government. If there was something like PayPal (say UKPal or Bank of England Pal) so that everyone in the U.K. had an automatic account of the form “idnumber@ukpal.co.uk”, then the overall cost of the national payment infrastructure would surely fall? Nevermind BACS or FPS, if I wanted to send my brother fifity quid then I’d securely log in to Bank of England Pal using my ID card and instruct an instant transfer. What’s not to like?

Technorati Tags: e-purse, payments, privacy

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[Dave Birch] According to recent APACS figures, total card fraud losses on U.K. issued cards went up by a quarter in the first half of this year. This increase has been driven by a 126 per cent rise in fraud on U.K.-issued cards being used overseas (U.K. retail losses were down 11 per cent, U.K. cash machine losses down 57 per cent). The U.K. has long been Europe’s biggest exporter of card fraud, so it’s good to see that our smooth and successful EMV transition has helped us to remain the league leaders. Losses from online, phone and mail order shopping fraud have continued to increase year-on-year but the fraud to turnover ratio on online card transactions has continued to fall. In the U.K. it’s now down to 50 basis points. For comparison purposes, total fraud in a typical card portfolio is about 6 basis points and bad debt is about 600 basis points.

Technorati Tags: ATM, fraud, payments

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] Biometrics continue to advance in Japan with the news that Hitachi is teaming with Japanese issuer JCB to develop a biometric payment system based on its finger vein authentication technology that can be used as an alternative to cards and cash at the point of sale. Hitachi is set to begin testing the system with 200 employees in September to determine whether the technology is commercially viable for introduction in banks and shops. The system identifies the veins on a person’s finger when it is held over a scanner and matches the image with customer data already stored in the application. The vein authentication system has been available in the Japanese market since October 2006 and has already been deployed by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation as the user ID system for ATMs located in am/pm convenience stores throughout Japan, which is why I thought the technology deserved its own podcast. Japan isn’t the only place where biometrics are being rolled out in this way. Banks in India are looking at deploying biometric ATMs targeted to reach the unbanked population in rural India. Using thumbprint and voice guidance in ATMs reduces literacy requirements to a considerable extent. Thus, establishing the identity of a rural depositor through biometrics makes it possible for illiterate or barely literate people to become part of the banking user community.

Technorati Tags: ATM, biometrics, payments

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[Dave Birch] One of the reasons by the British government’s IRIS scheme — which allows frequent travellers such as yours truly to enter the country via iris scanner instead of showing a passport to an immigration person (or, at least, theoretically does so: I’ve given up using it because it never works) — is so bad is because it is attempting to match against a large and growing database. This means that certain parameters have to be set to position the FAR/FRR curves in particular ways: if there’s a doubt, keep him out! If, on the other, you are matching a biometric template one-to-one against a securely stored templates, you can set the curves to be more tolerant, more workable in real world situations. An example of how the IRIS probably should have worked. Nevertheless, the biometric authentication market continues to grow steadily, with interesting new implementations coming along all the time. One that caught my eye is the system being installed at The Venetian Macao, the world’s largest casino, has deployed 13 VisionAccess 3D Face Readers in order to authenticate 12,000 employees at the front entrance when a new shift starts. Bioscrypt’s 3D face reader is a hands-free biometric solution that authenticates users in under a second by matching the structure of the person’s face against their enrolled template (ie, a one-to-one match). The readers function by shining a near infrared grid pattern on a user’s face. A camera then takes a picture of the resulting distortions in the grid pattern to match against the template, which is stored in a contactless smart card (typically kept in a hip pocket). That’s the way to do it.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, identity

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.