By Marla Boone
Contributing columnist
Since cybercriminals have become so smart, consumers have to up their games as well. This is very bad news for consumers who must deal with cyber-anything, much less a fifteen-year-old in Beijing who has figured out all our passwords. More on passwords later. If I can remember. And remembering is the very worst part about passwords.
The good tech guys, as identified by their white pocket protectors, are trying to come up with foolproof ways to absolutely identify those using secure sites. Phones have face ID. More precisely, some phones have face ID. My phone, whose primary selling point was that it fits in the back pocket of my jeans, certainly doesn’t. It will, under the right circumstances, recognize my finger print. Finger prints usually don’t change. But what happens when a pre-Botoxed face wants access to a post-Botoxed phone ID system? Are smartphones smart enough to allow for a little chemical intervention?
If your vetting system isn’t interested in your whole face, maybe it can identify you by your ears. Ears are apparently a very personal thing. Have your outer ear mapped today and get rid of that pesky lanyard with your company ID badge. Ears are much harder to lose than lanyards and there is no to little danger you will leave them in your car when you trudge in from employee parking.
Most devices already have some sort of voice recognition. This is not without its hazards. A friend of mine who is from Australia bought one of the very first cars with voice recognition capability. The problem was, it could not understand his lovely Aussie accent. And my neighbor almost went crazy trying to have the house’s virtual assistant turn her lights on. She tried for two weeks until someone told her she was asking Alexa to do the work when all along the entity inside her magic speaker/command follower was Siri. (I am not at all sure the woman who turns the lights on for you is referred to as a virtual assistant but it sounded sufficiently geeky to be correct.)
Eyes are a big item in identity as anyone who has read “Angels and Demons” won’t soon forget. In the opening chapters, some hapless scientist is murdered and his eye is plucked from his rapidly cooling corpse to gain access to a secret laboratory. In the very embodiment of ambition, India is amassing iris pattern data on all of its one billion plus residents. By the time they get the first billion done, there may be another billion to contend with, but that’s just nitpicking. The FBI and CIA are using retinal blood vessel patterns to verify the identity of agency “insiders.” This is how insiders know they are insiders.
For we common folk, there are sensors to detect “volatile body chemicals.” Volatile, by Google definition, means easily evaporated at normal temperatures or, more ominously, liable to change rapidly and unpredictably, especially for the worst. Just the characteristic you want in a body odor. It, not surprisingly, has a very low accuracy rating.
Enough about using various body parts to confirm who you are. Very recently there was an enormous data breach. Millions of social security numbers, birthdates, and other incredibly valuable information was compromised by one of the bad tech guys. Everyone affected, and the postage alone must have bankrupted the parent company, got a letter outlining steps to take to protect one’s identity. Credit freezes, credit checks, fraud alerts…all good ideas. Another idea posited was to change our passwords. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have dozens and dozens of passwords. We are not, of course, supposed to write these down. We are not, of course, supposed to repeat them. We are not, of course, capable of doing both of those things simultaneously. I spent the better part of three days thinking up combinations that did not involve important dates, addresses, repetitive numbers, with capital and lower case letters, with numbers, and special characters. But not too special. Give the kid in Beijing a fighting chance.
Marla Boone resides in Covington and writes for Miami Valley Today.
