Iris Recognition

Iris recognition, as the name suggests, is a biometric verification method that utilizes the unique pattern of each person’s iris, the colored circular structure in the eye, to confirm one’s identity. More explicitly, the authentication process is realized by scanning an iris at a reasonable distance with a near-infrared light and then comparing the acquired template to the already existing templates in the large database system.

Similar to face recognition and fingerprinting, iris recognition uses human biological characteristics to distinguish one person from another; however, it is preferable to the prior two technologies because of the structural attributes of the eye’s iris. These attributes call our attention to identity, privacy, and consent concerns that have come into view gradually as iris recognition is becoming more widely used over time.

image from www.bayometric.com

Advantages

High Accuracy

Even though iris recognition is not guaranteed to be perfectly correct all the time and many factors, like change of lighting, affect accuracy, iris recognition leaves less room for deceit because it is more difficult and problematic to change one’s iris than it is to alter other body parts. The first documentation of appearance-altering surgery (to help people recover from injuries) can be dated back to more than four thousand years ago, and within the recent decades, cosmetic surgery techniques have matured. As a result, more people have adopted cosmetic surgery to change or improve their facial appearance. The advancement of this field offers an opportunity for ill-intentioned people to successfully sneak through criminal checkpoints. In addition to altering one's face, there are also multiple ways of altering one’s fingerprints. According to a report in Forensic magazine, the FBI has caught hundreds of suspects who tried to alter their distinctive marks at their fingertips by deep cuts, burning, biting, and using sandpaper to avoid identification.

Remote Scan

Iris recognition is also more efficient because of the way the eye is scanned. While an iris scanner only needs to convert iris patterns to data, and can do so at a considerable distance, facial recognition demands close-proximity scanning of many facial parts in order to collect essential features, and fingerprint detection requires people to physically press their fingers onto the machines. And iris recognition is only getting more remote. Within recent years, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have increased the distance from which iris recognition is able to work to more than ten meters away from a moving subject.

Ethical Issues

Identity

Due to the high accuracy of iris recognition, many countries including the UK and the United Arab States are using this technology as a national ID for citizens and as a passport for travelers. But this is a double-edged sword, as the high accuracy of iris recognition imposes serious consequences of identity theft of using high-resolution photos of someone else's iris. It is very likely that iris recognition will become a substitute for other legal documents like drivers’ licenses and will be applied to more situations where some sort of ID is required. Irises are not like fake paper documents that can be detected easily, and also if someone’s iris pattern is stolen, it cannot be fixed easily like getting a new Facebook account because it is impossible for people to get new iris patterns or alter their eyes completely.

Privacy and Consent

Up till now, iris recognition has been used mainly by the U.S. military to identify captives taken from foreign battlefields, by police departments to surveil law-breakers, by the Department of Homeland Security to spot suspects on watch lists, and by law enforcement at borders to identify smugglers and terrorists. In spite of that, while more iris data are collected from people and commercial iris scanners become cheaper and more accessible to the general public, it can be used for stalking of ordinary innocent people even without their noticing it. Imagine driving on the street while someone with an iris recognition surveillance camera identifies people easily at a far distance when they glance into the rear-view mirror. Or imagine while walking down the street surrounded by cameras that know about each person who passes by, including who they are, whom they have met, whom their friends are, where they have been to at what time, and what their daily routines are. In this sense, iris recognition is like face recognition discussed in the paper "Face Recognition and Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality". They make "online and offline data seamlessly blend in this 'augmented' reality world" and call our attention to solving the rising privacy matters.

Another issue of consent relates to the way law enforcements collects iris data. There have been reports from the New York Times that some police officers hold detainees longer than they should be merely because those people refuse to have their iris photographs taken. From a security point of view, iris records help police keep track of suspects if they try to escape from charges. Nevertheless, as far as most people are concerned, the data might be used to track defendants even after the charge is dropped or the case is closed. Iris data should be given voluntarily, and the police have no right to force detainees to do so, especially in the situations when there is no legislative authorization.How iris recognition should be employed definitely demands further serious and ad hoc consideration.