The curse of the biometric future

There's a market for software that recognizes your face and fingerprints, but also increasing fear that Big Brother will be the one staring hard at your eyes and nose.

By Sam Williams

Feb 26, 2004 | Ten years ago, Dr. Joseph Atick was a Rockefeller University research scientist sitting atop an intriguing and potentially lucrative breakthrough in the realm of pattern recognition.

In an attempt to mimic how the human brain processes sensory signals, Atick and his research team developed a computational model that zeroes in on a person's facial landmarks and measures the relative distances between them. Once stored, these measurements become, in essence, a template unique enough to match individuals with their photo-ID or mugshot images in various, controlled situations.

For Atick, a mathematical physicist by training, the future boiled down to two choices: He could debate the implications of that breakthrough amid the safe, quasi-utopian world of academia, or he could try to put it to work in the messy, dynamic world of commercial software.

"It was almost like a curse," says Atick, now the chief executive officer of Identix, a Minnesota-based leader in fingerprint- and facial-recognition technology. "You're cursed with the blessing of knowing something important, something that society wants. You feel like it belongs to society and not to you."

The notion of curses attached to certain elements of human knowledge is an apt introduction to the field of biometric software, the blanket term used to describe software built to identify or authenticate human users from digitally captured physical data. Like genetic engineering and nuclear power, it is a field where innovation and controversy go hand in hand and where ordinary researchers must constantly weigh the long-term implications of their work. Toss in the vagaries of a marketplace where governments, police departments and other slow-moving bureaucracies play the role of lead customers and early adopters, and the "curse" image seems almost too good to ignore.

As the field's own evangelists note, it is an industry niche where optimism and reality often have a hard time making a connection.

"The perception out there is that with all this money the government is funneling into [biometric security], it should be growing like gangbusters," says Jeff Watkins, a senior technology consultant for the International Biometric Group, a New York consulting firm. "Although you do have a number of companies that are growing, they're certainly not growing with the speed that we saw with other software and technology segments."

Watkins' own company has put the sector's rate of growth at 44 percent per year, a rate that would put the global biometric industry over the billion-dollar mark by the end of the 2004. Such numbers date back to 2002, however, when the sector was enjoying a sustained period of positive press in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Since then, the media's attention has chilled slightly as journalists have zeroed in on the ethical and technological challenges that still impede the use of biometric security as a cheap replacement for flesh-and-blood security. As civil rights groups have focused their ire on the U.S. PATRIOT Act and other post-9/11 expansions of federal policing authority, biometric companies have, for the most part, retreated into the background of the dispute.

For biometric entrepreneurs, the dimming of the media spotlight has brought an associated decrease in venture capital and IPO prospects. Still, given the controversial nature of the business, many seem to have welcomed the recent quiet.

"After 9/11, a lot of noise entered the system," says Atick. "In a way it ended up delaying things, because people got confused about what was available. Luckily the confusion goes away through a natural-selection process."

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