privacy

Ultimately, there are too many databases with people's fingerprints out there, and my expectation is that they're gonna leak at some point.

So that means two things:

• First, don't use biometrics to check identity unless you're in a position where a person forging them can actually be checked for forged biometrics and get in trouble if caught. Like, customs at an airport, where you could see if someone has fake caps on their fingers or something. Biometrics cannot normally be invalidated. If it leaks and you're using the fingerprints to authenticate yourself to, say, your laptop or your bank or something, you can never invalidate those credentials, and people will always be able to get into your bank account. Specifically in the case of fingerprints, it's often not even that hard to get ahold of a specific individual's biometrics -- you leave a record of them on any smooth surface that you touch.

• Second, if you're in a position where you don't want to leave behind a signature, you might want to wear something that masks biometrics. If you have widely-leaked biometrics databases floating around that anyone can get access to, and you, say, put your hand on something, you've just left a signature that anyone can map to identity. Maybe bring back gloves, say. I don't think that we're at a point where there are systems that can do iris scans at a distance without someone knowing. Facial recognition is definitely doable at a distance, and that happens today. People at political protests who are worried about being identified, some military people, stuff like that, will mask their face. Maybe it makes sense to roll back anti-mask laws if facial databases are gonna be floating around. I dunno about gait recognition, whether that's sufficiently-unique to distinguish among a large number of people at a distance.