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Technology Stocks : Identix (IDNX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian Murray who wrote (16204)	1/5/2000 11:13:00 AM
From: David	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26039

If biometrics is going mainstream, its last major 'form factor' will be in a biometrically protected smart card. The smart card will carry a lot of your personal information and enable you to download money from the Internet (storing it on the smart card), or hold medical information on the card, which can be presented and read at any doctor's office, etc. The card would include a finger-scanning chip, and unless you place your finger on the chip (while it is in a reader), the card remains inactive. No one stealing your card could use it. However, the technology used will also require you to key in a password, because the system is not going to be holding millions of fingerprint templates, searching for a match when you present your finger. It will be trying to make a one:one match, based on you telling it where to look via the password. If the biometric smart card is capable enough -- this is pretty far away, technically -- all the biometric functions (template extraction and matching) may be made within the card, perhaps powered by the reader. That would negate the need for a password, I think. However, for some years most or all of these functions will be carried out over the network that the smart card connects to via the reader, and a password will be required. Other configurations are also possible. You may see a point of sale reader with a fingerscanner built in. That would compare your print to the one stored in the smart card that has been placed in the reader. You could see a similar version of this using a reader attached to a PC, and the PC keyboard has a scanner that is used instead of the POS scanner. It's clear to me that smart card readers do not have to have a fingerscanner in them for the system to work. That's just one configuration among several. And I don't know enough about readers to know whether current-day smart card readers could be used in this system without further hardware modifications (I expect they would need software changes).