Forget face, iris, and fingerprint biometric scans. Are you ready for the veins in your body to be โphotographed,โ cataloged, and made available to โ in reality, eventually, or soon enough โ who knows who, who knows for what purpose, depending on circumstances/price, at any point in time?
Youโre probably not, but there is a Switzerland-based biometrics startup called Global ID that is certainly ready to provide a way of collecting that โ very โ personal data. And the company says โ now is your turn to believe it, of course โ that the (sole) purpose is to authenticate systems and enterprise access control methods.
But how many โinnovativeโ methods of performing this same task do we actually need? Donโt we already have โIT adminsโ controlling every employeesโ computer, locked down?
What we do know right now is that Global ID is not toiling alone, on the margins. To help this effort along, the US has recently approved two patents for technology that its makers say is created for the purpose of said system authentication โ via finger-veins.
Letโs look at what Global ID has in store for the world, should its approved patents work out. One โ US2023094432 โ is about โstoring vein biometrics on the chip of an โelectronic identity objectโ.โ
A lot of people who know what theyโre looking at, when they look at the overall tech industry today, justly donโt like centralization โ of pretty much anything. Itโs just inherently dangerous.
โThe match would be carried out over an encrypted symmetric data link, and would add a layer of security and assurance to ID credentials, without introducing the risk of creating a large store of sensitive personal information,โ say reports.
We donโt learn what kind of โencryptionโ weโre talking about here, or how the โlayerโ here justifies the overall purpose.
The (ominously, perhaps) branded Global ID assures us that its patent is actually โavoiding a centralized databaseโ โ by virtue of getting blood vein biometric stored on the chip of what it calls โan electronic identity objectโ that can be matched to โa verification terminal.โ
Thereโs something about this that made the US Patents Office approve the filing. It may be that they fully understood it. Or, that they have not, at all.
The other patent, US2023084042, now logically expands the scheme to a โbiometric serverโ matching this data in order to allow an entity to โimplement secure access control on a desktop computer.