What Are Biometrics?

The first time I ever heard of this term biometrics was two years ago during a database concepts lecture. Yet, when it was explained to me I knew that it was a big deal on the news after the 9/11 incident. I believe at that time I was so bombarded by the news constantly reporting national security issues and intelligence conferences where major IT security companies were heavily sought. Vaguely, I remember an anchor person talking about how the government was considering the use of software that could identify criminals, terrorists, or otherwise potentially dangerous individuals before the board a plane simply by scanning the irises of their eyes. Immediately, I thought wow we're really going sci-fi now. I can not recall how many times I had seen all that technology in futuristic movies, spy movies, and movies that involve government corruption e.g. Enemy of the State, Pelican Brief, and the list just gets longer. Still, I had never really made the connection to databases despite being obviously aware that some instance of information sharing and checking had to occur. Thus, I decided I to look around to see what interesting articles I could find about biometrics.

First, I just wanted to know what it meant. An official definition for biometrics was provided on the website http://www.eff.org/wp/biometrics-whos-watching-you and given as the following:

"Biometrics refers to the automatic identification or identity verification of living persons using their enduring physical or behavioral characteristics. Many body parts, personal characteristics and imaging methods have been suggested and used for biometric systems: fingers, hands, feet, faces, eyes, ears, teeth, veins, voices, signatures, typing styles, gaits and odors ."

Biometrics as far as I understand are basically metric systems (or measuring systems) based upon living organisms or tissue (bio) that is used in an attempt to uniquely identify (primary key ideal) individuals. My interpretation or paraphrasing of the term calls to mind a database. When I think about how biometrics can be used to discriminate one related entity from another, then I begin to think about primary keys which uniquely identify a set of data and normalization which optimizes the retrieval of that data. However, like most databases there are limitations and potential for errors. And this presents a lot of major concerns for the EFF and others, which leads to another blog discussion on biometrics.