A voluntary scheme is to start operation in Yeovil soon that will seen drinkers submit themselves to fingerprint scans and having their photos taken by pubs and clubs.
Avon and Somerset police have joined forces with the local licensees in an effort to make Yeovil a far safer place to drink.
“The aim is to make the town safer on a night out – violent crime has dropped by 16 per cent in the last year but we aim to reduce this further.
If this were any place but Yeovil I’d think this was an unnecessary step in the fight against anti-social behaviour and alcohol related violence.
As seems to be the case with every biometric based system they have chosen to build a database of innocent individuals in order to keep out the troublemakers. It would be just as effective and less of a security concern if they just stored the data of known troublemakers and scanned everyone who entered but only to check against the blacklist of offenders so that innocent revellers could remain anonymous.
Building a database of everyone is just going to increase the chances of false positives and misidentifying someone as a violent troublemaker when they are not. Plus any database that contains biometric data of thousands of people is going to be a target of identity thieves.
Tags: computer security, biometrics, security
