(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
Yes, I know the differences between the various factors of authentication.
Let me focus on two of the factors.
- Something You Are. This is the factor that identifies people. It includes biometrics modalities (finger, face, iris, DNA, voice, vein, etc.). It also includes behavioral biometrics, provided that they are truly behavioral and relatively static.
- Something You Have. While this is used to identify people, in truth this is the factor that identifies things. It includes driver’s licenses and hardware or software tokens.
There’s a very clear distinction between these two factors of authentication: “something you are” for people, and “something you have” for things.
But what happens when we treat the things as beings?
- Like cars with license plates?
- And bots with power?
Who, or what, possesses identity?
License Plate Recognition
I’ve spent a decade working with automatic license plate recognitrion (ALPR), sometimes known as automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).
Actually more than a decade, since my car’s picture was taken in Montclair, California a couple of decades ago doing something it shouldn’t have been doing. I ended up in traffic school for that one.
Now license plate recognition isn’t that reliable of an identifier, since within a minute I can remove a license plate from a vehicle and substitute another one in its place. However, it’s deemed to be reliable enough that it is used to identify who a car is.
Note my intentional use of the word “who” in the sentence above.
- Because when my car made a left turn against a red light all those years ago, the police didn’t haul MY CAR into court.
- Using then-current technology, it identified the car, looked up the registered owner, and hauled ME into court.
These days, it’s theoretically possible (where legally allowed) to identify the license plate of the car AND identify the face of the person driving the car.
But you still have this strange merger of who and what in which the non-human characteristics of an entity are used to identify the entity.
What you are.
But that’s nothing compared to what’s emerged over the past few years.
We Are The Robots
When the predecessors to today’s Internet were conceived in the 1960s, they were intended as a way for people to communicate with each other electronically.
And for decades the Internet continued to operate this way.
Until the Internet of Things (IoT) became more and more prominent.
How prominent? The Hacker News explains:
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the connective tissue behind digital modernization, helping applications and databases exchange data more effectively. The State of API Security in 2024 Report from Imperva, a Thales company, found that the majority of internet traffic (71%) in 2023 was API calls.
Couple this with the increasing use of chatbots and other artificial intelligence bots to generate content, and the result is that when you are communicating with someone on the Internet, there is often no “who.” There’s a “what.”
What you are.
Between the cars and the bots, there’s a lot going on.
What does this mean?
There are numerous legal and technical ramifications, but I want to concentrate on the higher meaning of all this. I’ve spent 29 years professionally devoted to the identification of who people are, but this focus on people is undergoing a seismic change.
The science fiction stories of the past, including TV shows such as Knight Rider and its car KITT, are becoming the present as we interact with automobiles, refrigerators, and other things. None of them have true sentience, but it doesn’t matter because they have the power to do things.
- Even with this opinionated writer, occasionally a bot is telling me what to write.
- My thermostat is changing my house temperature for my own good.
- It’s only a matter of time before a bot kills someone.
In the meantime, the identification industry not only has to identify people, but also identify things.
And it’s becoming more crucial that we do so, and do it accurately.
Bredemarket 