Question

Research how biometrics is used in your city (or town or township or country). Describe the application and its benefits and risks.

Answer 1

Biometrics allows a person to be identified and authenticated based on unique and specific recognizable and verifiable data.

Application of Biometrics: There are numerous applications of biometrics which help in making decisions or deploy some rules. Various fields where Biometrics is very useful:

1. Employees Attendance in an organization
2. Citizens' Data for making policies and rules for the common man.
3. Fingerprint Verification helps in identifying the criminals and isolation of the suspects
4. Voice command operations in various devices used in IOT
5. Signature Verification in case of Frauds and Cheating
6. Keystroke pattern identification for various legal investigations
7. DNA verification in very complex cases of legal and medical importance
8. Face Recognition for various purposes
9. Law Enforcement and public security
10. Defense
11. Border Control
12. Travel
13. Migration
14. Civil Identity, population registration, and voter registration
15. KYC process for various agencies and organizations
16. Physical and logical access control
17. Healthcare
18. Govt. schemes related to subsidy
19. Commercial Applications
20. Educational Institutions etc...

The recent application of biometrics in the town is "CONTACT TRACING of the COVID-19 PATIENTS"

Since we all are suffeing from the woes offered by "COVID-19", it is very important for the authorities to minimize the spread of corona in the society. To minimize the spread, authorities have used "BIOMETRICS" to maintain records of covid-19 patients and find and isolate the contacts of covid-19 patients.

Risks invovled in Biometrics:

1. False Negatives: If someone clones the voice/signature/retina etc. the results can be detrimental for any organiztion, state or country.
2. Too costly: The Biometrics Technology is too costly to implement
3. Misuse of biometric data from social and business viewpoints: The misuse can cause havoc.