LADY LIBERTY: FINGER, PLEASE

Wanna rent a locker at the newly-​​reopened Statue of Liberty? Then get ready to have your fin­ger­print read by an elec­tronic scan­ner.
It’s one of sev­eral ways that bio­met­ric tech­nol­ogy is now “creep­ing into every­day life,” the AP notes.

The Nine Zero, an upscale hotel in Boston, recently began let­ting guests in its $3,000-a-night Cloud Nine suite enter and exit by look­ing into a cam­era that ana­lyzes their iris pat­terns. Piggly Wiggly Co. gro­cery stores in the South just launched a pay-​​by-​​fingerprint sys­tem, though pilot tests else­where have had luke­warm results…
Feelings seemed mixed about the lock­ers at the Statue of Liberty on a muggy New York after­noon last week.
Some peo­ple were befud­dled by the sys­tem and had to put their fin­gers on the reader sev­eral times before a scan was prop­erly made. Others for­got their locker num­ber upon their return, or didn’t remem­ber which fin­ger they had used to check it out. One young woman acci­den­tally put her ticket to the statue in the locker, requir­ing her to open it and then re-​​register it all over again with another fin­ger scan.
With all the con­fu­sion, lines at the three touch­screen kiosks that con­trol the bank of 170 lock­ers fre­quently stretched six or seven peo­ple deep, requir­ing a five-​​minute wait.

August 12th, 2004 | Homeland Security, You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.