Future college students may start to find underage drinking a little more challenging.
Anil Jain, an award-winning researcher and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University, talked about how biometrics technology could be used in the future of personal identification to about 60 people at Pugh Hall Wednesday night.
Fingerprints, iris scans, voice scans and face scans could replace driver’s licenses and passports in the future, Jain said.
“Sooner or later [biometric technology] will affect all of us,” he said. “So it is important to understand it.”
Jain discussed the problems with current identification technologies.
Passwords and personal identification numbers, he said, are becoming increasingly easy to crack. Passports and driver’s licenses are also simple to forge, he said.
College students, he said, represent one of the largest populations of people who possess fake or duplicate IDs.
These forgeries may soon end as biometric science provides cheap, effective identification, Jain said.
Simple biometric programs are used in stores, shops and factories to limit access to sensitive information and verify employee data.
Disney World also uses biometrics, using face scans to replace employee timecards.
Even if the technology becomes cheap and effective enough to use, intelligent people will still be able game the system by creating false fingerprints or distorting their faces, Jain said.
“These errors are inevitable,” he said.
Besides the errors, questions about civil rights and liberty must also be addressed, he said.
“The U.S. government is concerned with the abuse of the technology to suppress peoples’ freedoms,” he said. “What will happen in the event of misidentification?”
Despite these problems, biometrics still has a bright future, he said.
Travis Pillow, a senior journalism major, said he appreciated Jain’s candid discussion.
“There are a lot of what-ifs here,” Pillow said. “If you don’t explore those, then you’re in trouble. He did a great job of dispelling the myth of the perfect fingerprint.”
