If you’ve ever seen the movie Minority Report, you may remember the ubiquitous eye scanners that dogged the film’s protagonist, a fugitive running from the consequences of a murder he hadn’t yet committed. The biometric scanners, used to ID people in high-traffic walkways for the purpose of delivering targeted ads, were part of a dystopian vision of the future that was no doubt meant to send a chill up the spine of viewers, who likely shuddered at the mere thought of such glib intrusions into their private lives.
While the technology portrayed in Minority Report is still more science fiction than reality, biometrics are here, and their applications are becoming more and more evident in the business world.
One company that’s using biometrics for identification and verification purposes is TASCET. While it may seem just a bit ironic to science fiction aficionados married to the notion that biometrics are an all-too-convenient tool for Big Brother, the Madison firm is actually dedicated to safeguarding consumers’ identity and privacy; preventing identity theft; and allowing private and public entities (in the financial, health care, academic, and government sectors) to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to regulatory compliance.
According to Larry Aubol, TASCET’s CEO, the company’s ICONN product uses a person’s finger proof (similar to a fingerprint) and face proof along with basic biographical information to create an ID number that is unique to each individual.
It’s a cutting-edge use of biometrics (in this case a facial scan instead of an eye scan) that’s nifty and forward-thinking enough to have netted the company a coveted invitation to FinovateSpring 2012, a conference taking place in San Francisco May 8-9 that showcases the latest in financial and banking technology.
According to Aubol, the technology provides for more reliable identification because it’s based on one’s own biometrics.
“You walk into a bank, they’ll ask to activate your ICONN, and if you say yes … they basically collect two finger proofs and a facial proof, and it comes to us along with five points of biographics, your name, your date of birth, your address, your gender, the country you were born in,” said Aubol. “We don’t take any other identifiers, like Social Security number or bank account number. We don’t want to know anything about you other than we want to make sure that nobody can impersonate you at a later date. So it comes into our database and then we measure it against all these industry sectors to make sure that you are unique, and then we send back a 16-digit representation of you. …
“If you were to go across the street, say you activated your ICONN at J.P. Morgan and you went across the street to Wells Fargo, they will go through the same process to activate it for their bank. … So whether you go to a casino, you go to make a wire transfer, you go to the bank, the credit union, eventually to buy a car, all these processes are the same, and your financial ICONN, we refer to it as a financial security number, is you and only you.”
Your ID is you
So essentially, the thinking goes, in this system it’s impossible for a customer to forge an ID because that customer’s face and fingerprint are the IDs. At the same time, if your face and fingerprints rather than your Social Security number are what underpin your identity, identity theft and identity fraud become a far more difficult proposition.
“The rationale behind this is to give you your privacy back,” said Aubol. “For the last five years, we’ve sat down with a lot of state governments, a lot of institutions, whether they’re financial or health care, many industry sectors in trying to understand what are the issues related to identity fraud and privacy. And it’s interesting if you’ve been following Charles Schumer and some of the others in D.C. who have been putting Facebook, Google, and all these other Internet companies on the hot seat asking about privacy. Well, that’s not the problem.
“Privacy really begins with the information that’s out there that LexisNexis and everyone else has about us that we don’t want them to have. Right now, for $6, I can find out when you used your credit card last, I can find out where your wife works, where your ex-wife works, who your ex-wife is married to, where your kids go to college. Being on Facebook or using Google, I have an expectation that they’re going to data mine. But when someone knows everything about my mortgage or my bank account, or who I see for a physician or where I use my credit, that’s disturbing.”
Of course, if TASCET is the guardian of your data, many will be skeptical about potential misuse of that data if hackers happen to breach the company’s files. That’s not really a legitimate worry, says Aubol.
“Suppose somebody hacks into our system; they have all of your data, they walk into a bank, and they say, ‘my name is Lisa, I want to open an account,’” said Aubol. “And the bank says, ‘Okay, Lisa, we checked your credit records, now we’re going to also check your identity record, we need to activate your financial ICONN, and this person, who is actually named Sheila, says okay. As soon as Sheila puts her finger image down or her finger proof, it comes to us, and we say, this is not Lisa, this is Sheila. Because you are your biometric, if you think it out, we do exactly what we’re supposed to do. If our system is hacked, somebody steals your identity, as soon as they use their biometric to impersonate you, the process is stopped.”
Synthetic identities
In addition to protecting consumers’ privacy and safeguarding their identities, ICONN has applications in addressing a less well-publicized problem known as synthetic identities.
“Synthetic identity is a really big issue,” said Aubol. “That’s what’s got a lot of the banks concerned right now. Synthetic identity is basically when someone takes a component of your identity, in particular your Social Security number, and wraps it around their personal data and takes on your persona, and you never know what happens. Nobody knows what happens.
“Let’s say you bank at US Bank, and no one has gone into US Bank as you, but they have gotten your personal data, and they’ve opened an account under your identity with their name, so they’re using your Social Security number at a different bank. Nobody knows this. Everything is moving along just fine, as long as this guy pays his bills, pays his credit cards, he’s using your identity to get him goods and services. And eventually what happens is, it could be a year, it could be a month, it could be five years out, the individual quits paying, and now it all is attributed to your Social Security number to the credit reporting agencies.”
ICONN also has important applications in the health care industry, says Aubol, considering the potentially fatal consequences of medical identity theft.
“In the health care industry, you’ve got way too many people using someone else’s insurance card,” said Aubol. “This is a little-discussed problem. If I, through social media, can learn a lot about you, and get your insurance card, which is pretty easy to do, I can start using your insurance company for my medical services. I could take on your persona and use your insurance company because you hardly go to the doctor.
“Now you get hit by a truck walking across the street, you’re unconscious, the ambulance picks you up, they pull out your wallet, and bring you to St. Mary’s, and all of a sudden, St. Mary’s looks up your name and there’s your medical record, and they say, ‘he’s a patient,’ and they give you the wrong blood, and you die. That happens more than what’s reported.”
Black helicopters
While the logic of the ICONN system may seem sound if it’s carefully explained, getting the average consumer onboard could be a tricky proposition, particularly when the prevailing zeitgeist appears to be pushing back against technology that can probe one’s identity with such a high degree of precision.
Aubol understands this concern, acknowledging that “people are going to see black helicopters.” While the technology has been ready for prime time for about six months, he knows that it’s incumbent on his company to educate consumers about the ICONN system before it can be fully implemented.
“In a community where we roll this out, we’ll do an awful lot of media play, educating them about the use of biometrics and why it can help them rather than hurt them, how data cannot be easily shared among entities, why your biometric can’t be replicated,” said Aubol. “Minority Report now has planted a seed, and it’s going the wrong way. People have no reason to understand or want to be concerned about biometrics until the time it has to be used, and mostly it’s an environment where you have no choice, like in law enforcement. And when you walk into your bank and you see the same thing on the desk that you saw in a law enforcement setting, there’s a tendency to say, ‘no way in hell, I’m not doing that.’ We have a different viewpoint of it entirely, and we need to share that with the consumer.”
The first step, though, is convincing the business community. That’s where Finovate comes in.
“There’s about 1,000 people that will be there this year for the financial industry, a number of media, and a lot of venture angel groups that like to invest in companies with cutting-edge technologies,” said Aubol. “We’re interested in it because, normally I don’t like to go out and brag about what you’ve done until after you’ve done it, but the demand for what we’re creating is so big.”
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