ZDNet Australia says ‘Black is White’
October 20th, 2006Maybe its because they are in the southern hemisphere, and the Coriolis Effect has addled their sunburned brains…whatever the reason, ZDNet Australia appears to be smoking crack:
Fingerprinting technology is the most reliable and cost effective biometric authentication technology but it’s not being deployed on a wide scale because people still imagine that criminals are the only ones that have to surrender their fingerprints, according to Sagem.
Users are resisting the switch to fingerprint authentication technologies because they still see the process of giving a fingerprint as somehow related to being caught by the police, according to Gilles Novel, manager for secure terminals and transactions at Sagem Australasia.
“We have to shift mentality away from where people are scared [of giving their fingerprints],” Novel told ZDNet Australia. “The problem we have faced is that people think ‘if I enrol my fingerprint there has to be, one way or the other, a link to the police’. They think criminal activity instead of their own privacy.”
Novel argues that attitudes are slowly changing — especially as people slowly realise that fingerprints are more reliable than passwords and can help increase, not erode, privacy.
“If you are an employer and someone does the wrong thing on your network, that person can say ‘it wasn’t me — someone has used my password’. But in the case of biometrics, how can you say ‘it wasn’t my finger?’.” Novel told ZDNet Australia.
???!!!
This uncritical article can only be the result of paid for PR insertion. Everyone knows that fingerprinting is for criminals, and that it should remain ONLY for criminals; free and innocent people should be at liberty to be anonymous and unaccounted for; the exact opposite of what happens when you give your fingerprints to anyone. ZDNet has just published an article that claims that Black is White.
Unbelievable.
Fingerprinting violates your privacy in many ways, which we have outlined on BLOGDIAL for years, and which the writers of a technology rag like ZDNet should for certain understand, ummm don’t they read The Register for crying out loud?
The piece ends with this:
In Australia, fingerprinting technology was being adopted by Centrelink, the government’s nationwide human services agency. Last year, the organisation decided to ditch passwords in favour of a fingerprint authentication system that would require it to purchase and deploy 31,000 finger scanners. However, the plan was scrapped earlier this year.
[…]
Well I do declare, there ARE some sensible people in Australia!
WHY was it scrapped ZDNet Australia? Could it have something to do with the incredible and totally sucessful resistance to ID cards that smashed the Australian governments plans so many years ago?
Maybe we need some of that Coriolis Effect and hot sun here in the UK!