An engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon says he’s invented technology that can identify someone from across the room with the precision of a fingerprint.
As with fingerprints, an individual’s iris is so distinctive as to be unique.
“Fingerprints, they require you to touch something. Iris, we can capture it at a distance, so we’re making the whole user experience much less intrusive, much more comfortable,” Savvides told me. Unlike other scanners, which required someone to step up to a machine, his scanner can capture someone’s iris and face as they walk by.
“There’s no X-marks-the-spot. There’s no place you have to stand. Anywhere between six and 12 meters, it will find you, it will zoom in and capture both irises and full face,” he said.
Carnegie Mellon describes a whole host of functions for the scanner beyond just police use. It could replace government IDs at the airport and elsewhere. Like other types of biometrics, it could replace a laptop’s login system.
As a sector, biometrics are undoubtedly important. Many security experts believe that passwords—and the security regime that accompanies them—are fundamentally broken. Savvides, for his part, sees biometrics as one more method of human-computer interaction. And near everyone would like to reduce traffic-stop murders.
Yet there’s something threatening about long-range iris scanning. Identification to a degree comparable to finger prints, at a distance, is not something our social habits and political institutions are wired for.
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