Fall On Your Face?

Many of you may be aware that this week the government in their ‘infinite wisdom’ have decided to trial a facial recognition system at Manchester & Stansted airports. Lets have a little look and see why this is a pointless endevour to “add another layer of security and not repace existing systems”.

A test on this scale is normally to work out any final bugs out and produce a final system that will then be rolled out across the rest of a network. There will be a few problems with this for our beloved UK gov.

To start with, facial recognition technology has NEVER been accurate, throwing up false-negatives and false-positives so this appears to be as much a test of the technology as it is of the security system and as far as I can tell it is based on existing technology. Concerns by the Biometrics Assurance Group (pdf) [show] that there is still work to do on both the facial recognition standards and the format in which facial images are stored.

This means the government is committing to a system upon which there are NO standards to adhere to, basically making this a very risky operation. Considering the biometric chip in passports may be incompatible with other systems, or at the very least when a standard is agreed UK residents with the chipped passports may end up having to get yet another passport. Normally standards are agreed before any large-scale testing goes ahead so this seems rather fool-hardy.

Now lets consider people who have gone before. There have been many tested applications of facial recognition and nearly all have been scrapped after only a few years in service as they proved impractical and inaccurate.

“Boston’s Logan Airport also ran two separate tests of facial recognition systems at its security checkpoints using volunteers. Over a three month period, the results were disappointing. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the system only had a 61.4 percent accuracy rate, leading airport officials to pursue other security options.”

If this is supposed to be another layer of security, to augment the already ludacris systems that are in place, then passengers will see no benefit at all. Did I mention that the whole process will be overlooked by securities staff who can step in at any time and take you to a real person to match your picture.

If all goes well and the system works then it will be truely remarkable and may indeed speed up entry through immigration. However, I feel that given the problems many people have with technology the so-called speed may be just an illusion, a target, similar to the fiasco at Heathrow Terminal 5. Not to mention the fact the system may fall flat on it’s face irrispective of whether people can use it. I predict an amalgation of both which will troublingly create some of the longest queues, the opposite of the desired effect.