the required right thumbprint. This is surprising, as it turns out, because many Malawian farmers grow tobacco, which requires the heavy use of fingertips in the transplant of seedlings. Over the years, their fingerprint ridges may become too worn to be read or captured by a fingerprint scanner.
• The accuracy of biometric technology remains, to a large extent, untested. Biometric companies report very high accuracy rates from highly controlled trials that typically use artificially generated data. However, because the performance of a technology depends greatly on the context in which it is used, trials using real-life data are far less impressive. For example, the United Kingdom passport service trial reports that only 80 percent of the participants could be correctly verified by their fingerprints, and younger individuals were more successfully identified than older ones. In Malawi, however, everyone selected during demonstration sessions was correctly identified.
• Individuals may have a negative attitude toward providing their biometrics. People may be reluctant to place their fingers on scanners due to hygiene concerns. More importantly, there is the widespread public perception that fingerprinting is linked to the criminal justice process. Therefore, in conflict-affected countries that are stricken by ethnic infighting, individuals may refuse to provide biometrics for fear of persecution by authorities or others who could gain illegal access to such biometric records. The parliamentary debates concerning the United Kingdom’s identification cards bill revealed that 55 percent of poll respondents thought the collection of biometric information was an infringement of civil liberties. The authors did not encounter any such resistance from farmers in Malawi, perhaps because the technology was very novel.
• The cost of collecting biometrics can be high. The estimates are sparse, and detailed cost–benefit analyses have not been systematically conducted. However, the costs of using different types of biometric technology—from basic fingerprinting techniques to voice- and iris-recognition software—can be prohibitively expensive. In India there are legitimate concerns that the costs of rolling out biometric technology may mean a huge opportunity cost for more than 700 million Indians living in poverty to receive social benefits. In the United Kingdom, a critical report by several researchers at the London School of
Economics and Political Science found that the government underestimated the implementation of the Identity Cards Bill. The report suggests that the ten-year rollout would cost between 10.6 billion and 19.2 billion pounds (compared to the government estimate of 5.84 billion pounds over the same period), excluding public- or private-sector integration costs.
• Biometric technology is not infallible. While biometric identification systems can help combat identity theft, fraud, and money laundering, they are essentially technological applications and, as with any other technology, can be hacked or infiltrated. These systems therefore run the risk of having data fall into the wrong hands. Since biometric technology is only being piloted on a large scale in some pockets of the world at present, legitimate concerns on privacy do arise. For example, it is possible to imagine that identification-database workers will be threatened, blackmailed, and possibly corrupted. After all, the perpetrators of 80 percent of all computer security lapses are not hackers, but employees.
• It is important that a common platform be used if biometric data are merged with other datasets. Biometric data are stored in formats that may not be compatible with the information systems of other government agencies, so an effort must be made to have compatibility if biometrics are to serve as the basis for a national identification system.
Conclusion
Despite these concerns, biometric technology presents an exciting and innovative opportunity for increased access to financial markets and better delivery of social assistance programs such as conditional cash transfers, aid distribution, or subsidized inputs or commodities. Whether it can be scaled up effectively and used to resolve identification and authentication issues is a challenge that requires more research. n
For further reading: X. Giné, J. Goldberg, and D. Yang, “Identification Strategy: A Field Experiment on Dynamic Incentives in Rural Credit Markets,” mimeo (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2009); U.S. General Accounting Office, Using Biometrics for Border Security (Washington, D.C.: 2002); London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Identity Project,
www.identityproject.lse.ac.uk.
Xavier Giné (
xgine@worldbank.org) is a senior economist in the Research Development Group at the World Bank. INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY
RESEARCH INSTITUTE Supported by the CGIAR
www.ifpri.org
sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty Supported by the CGIAR
www.worldbank.org Copyright © 2010 International Food Policy Research Institute and the World Bank. All rights reserved. Contact
ifpri-copyright@cgiar.org or
pubrights@worldbank.org for permission to republish.
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