Lax biometric standards slammed

The biometrics industry has been slammed for sidelining privacy concerns in a regulatory environment that was described as "weak and unethical" by the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, along with Australia's biggest banks and the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority, Computerworld reports.

NSW Council of Civil Liberties president, Cameron Murphy, slammed providers, the government and users of the technology for failing to adopt even minimal standards when implementing biometrics.

In a fierce attack at the Biometric Institute of Australia annual conference in Sydney last week, Murphy said an industry-backed privacy code introduced in September 2006 has been virtually ignored.

The European Union on Tuesday approved a European visa data system that will store biometric information, such as fingerprints and photos, on 70 million visa holders who pass through the EU's borderless travel zone each year, according to Delaware Online.

The agreement reached by EU justice and interior ministers will see the set-up of an EU database that can be accessed by all 15 EU nations participating in the so-called Schengen borderless travel area.

German interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the system is "an important tool" to boost border security, adding it would also enable participating EU nations to prevent people from so-called visa shopping among European nations.

Industry leaders say although the technology required for printing RFID tags is slowly maturing, research still needs to be done before printed tags can be offered commercially - and before they can be printed directly onto packaging, the RFID Journal reports.

Speaking at the IntertechPira Printed RFID conference, held earlier this month in Frankfurt, Germany, they said once these two milestones are achieved - at a reasonable price - RFID tagging will become pervasive throughout supply chains for almost every type of product.

Klaus Dimmler, conference chairman and founder of OrganicID - which is working to develop a low-cost technology to produce printable electronic RFID tags made with organic inks - summed up the conference: "The industry is making good progress on materials. They're looking better and better."

More London Underground (LU) users are choosing the Oyster card as a method of payment for the transport system, it has been claimed, leading to an announcement today that a number of station ticket offices are to be closed, the T"UV reports.

According to its official Web site, six out of every 10 journeys on the tube are paid for via the Oyster card, which enables travellers to pre-pay and then hold a smart card near a designated reader to have the correct fare deducted from their account.

And because it is a "faster, cheaper [and] easier" method of ticketing, LU has seen a "massive" decrease in the number of single and return tickets bought at station offices.