Since I watched Minority Report the ideas of using any aspect of my body part to gain access to important information has been quite daunting. No one wants to lose their eyeballs or fingertips for the sake of ‘increased security’.

These were also the concerns of Fin24 readers after it was released that ATM’s in South Africa might make use of fingerprint access. One wrote:

So now we lose our fingers when they chop them off to steal money at the ATM.

And another:

No. I would be concerned that someone would cut off my hand after rendering me unconscious to obtain my fingerprint. This will not work in South Africa.

And it carried on:

We live in a violent country. A good idea in principle, but this will only encourage robberies with the cardholder being held hostage.

Yet Nick Perkins, divisional director of Bytes IDM told Fin24 that the technologies being employed would be able to sense whether or not a finger is alive.

With an ATM, you’re by yourself so it’s an unattended interaction. So the opportunity for people to test the system at 02:00 in the morning at a petrol station is rife. You need the system to be able to detect whether it’s a real live finger or if something’s wrong.

One user, however, has clearly not seen Minority Report:

Truly I would not. Biometric systems are everywhere and have been around a long time. One could say long enough to find a way around security. The idea is good, yes, but a fingerprint in 2015 is very basic. If it’s something like an iris scanner then maybe, but that would also be copied in time.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

[source: fin24]