Think ID theft is a problem? Try protecting one billion people

CALIFORNIA, USA: The cutting edge of biometric identification using fingerprints or eye scans to confirm a person's identity is now in India

India's Aadhaar program, operated by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and created to confirm the identities of citizens who collect government benefits, has amassed fingerprint and iris data on 500 million people. It is the biggest biometric database in the world and can verify one million identities per hour, each one taking about 30 seconds.

The program unnerves some privacy advocates with its orwellian overtones, and the U.S.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized it as a threat to privacy.

A new study of initial results from India's biometric program found that it both reduced corruption and was popular with beneficiaries.

Now a Stanford business professor Lawrence Wein is proposing a way to make India's program far more accurate.

For Indian officials, the big practical challenge has been to make the program more accurate without getting bogged down when used by a billion people. Participation in India's program is voluntary, not mandatory.

The researchers' solution, which Indian officials are studying at the highest levels, is to focus on a particular subset of each person's fingerprints and eye scans that are the easiest to compare to those originally scanned. The combination of fingerprints and iris data will vary from person to person. For some people, it could be just the right index finger. For others, it could be an index finger and a thumb. Or, it could be the irises, or a combination of fingerprints and irises.

By spending a small amount of time on most people, and more time on a minority of others, the researchers found they could keep the average verification time to just 37 seconds. That's a bit longer than it takes to just compare one finger, but the rate of false rejections is about 200,000 times lower.

Weiner says for low-income countries, biometrics may have a big future.The paper, "Analyzing Personalized Policies for Online Biometric Verification," was published by PLOS ONE on May 1, 2014.