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It's disappointing how rigid society can be: it's my way or the highway. When someone doesn't have a particular, not inherently required characteristic to acce

It's disappointing how rigid society can be: it's my way or the highway. When someone doesn't have a particular, not inherently required characteristic to access something, there should be a series of fallbacks, but all too often this just excludes people. This can be seen in all areas of life, in different severities: - the entire topic of accessibility is about letting people make use of the abilities they have despite the ones they don't have. Not having functional legs doesn't have to prevent people from filing a document in the office. - technology which once was optional but never essential becomes required with time. Booking a doctor's visit over the phone only, buying goods over the internet only, filing taxes only with a computer, accessing a bank account only with an Android program. All that with no fallback to the post office or a personal visit. - the requirement to pass payments through an intermediary is getting more common. Gone are the days of paying bills or getting salary directly at the office, and the sphere of buying at the point of sale is losing the cash fallback, if stories from Asia are to be believed. None of the technological changes are bad as options, but when they become the only choices, they work to disenfranchise people, especially ones related to banking and travel freedom. Debit/credit cards are not accessible to a huge chunk of the world's population, and even in Europe, getting a bank account as an immigrant can be hard. Another thing that strikes me in the article is calling the condition "disease", without providing any evidence that it has any negative health impact. On the other hand, it matches the definition of disability as something the society imposes [0]. That would make this a paradoxical case of someone not impaired but disabled. [0] https://aeon.co/essays/what-does-it-mean-to-consider-yourself-a-disabled-person https://aeon.co/essays/what-does-it-mean-to-consider-yoursel...

chrismorgan 6y ago
Yet at the same time, that series of fallbacks has a tendency to become an attack vector on the process and a weakness in the system. To take a tech example, TLS downgrade attacks: you want to keep things working for older clients, but it’s possible for some party in the middle to intercept the traffic and feign non-support of the newer version (or stronger cipher suites), in order to push both parties to the older version or cipher suite, and if that older version or cipher suite has anything broken about it, now you have an easier target. Applied here, if you allow a no-fingerprints route that’s less secure, be aware that attackers will devise ways of getting onto that path for their own malicious purposes. Perhaps they’ll forge a doctor’s certificate, perhaps use some kind of acid that temporarily removes their fingerprints, that kind of thing. It’s an unfortunate balance. With TLS, you decide eventually at some point that the problems of still supporting the old, less-secure version are too serious, and so tough luck for people stuck on the old version. With this, I certainly hope it would err much more on the side of not locking people out of the System. (Fortunately, although this particular condition is very rare, there are a much larger number of people that have damaged fingerprints or fingerprints that don’t work in whatever readers get used.)
- techsupporter 6y ago
  There's no reason any other form of biometrics is less secure than fingerprints. My read of the article is that either the idea of someone not having fingerprints never came up or if that situation was considered it was filed under "we will handle the exceptions via a process to be developed later" and no process was developed. Worse, a process was developed--since we see in the article that some of these people were able to get ID cards and passports, documents requiring fingerprints--but it imposes a massive time barrier on the people. For one-offs like obtaining an ID card, a one-time imposition of a bit more time might be reasonable. "We've installed fingerprint readers at every location where you can apply for an ID card but retina readers are more expensive so they are only available at the main government office" may be fine if you're referring to a passport issued every ten years. But requiring a fingerprint for a SIM card yet having no backup for that at point-of-sale is not. This is the flaw in every single system designed by people who largely have no experience with people who have a difference in physical or mental characteristics than the designers. We see it in facial recognition trained primarily on people of a certain skin pigment. Social systems designed by people who are neurotypical. Transport systems implemented by people assuming a base level of technological or literacy skill. The list goes on. The people doing the designing aren't being inherently mean or malicious, they're simply not thinking. And not thinking is very easy, but makes systems that are very impenetrable to people not included in that thinking.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    > There's no reason any other form of biometrics is less secure than fingerprints. Anything which is a non-standard fallback with limited use is likely to be less secure. Not because the method would be inherently worse, but just because reduced use means that less attention and effort goes into building and maintaining it.
amp180 6y ago
Good catch on the 'disease' bit. Pure ableism.

chrismorgan 6y ago

Yet at the same time, that series of fallbacks has a tendency to become an attack vector on the process and a weakness in the system. To take a tech example, TLS downgrade attacks: you want to keep things working for older clients, but it’s possible for some party in the middle to intercept the traffic and feign non-support of the newer version (or stronger cipher suites), in order to push both parties to the older version or cipher suite, and if that older version or cipher suite has anything broken about it, now you have an easier target. Applied here, if you allow a no-fingerprints route that’s less secure, be aware that attackers will devise ways of getting onto that path for their own malicious purposes. Perhaps they’ll forge a doctor’s certificate, perhaps use some kind of acid that temporarily removes their fingerprints, that kind of thing. It’s an unfortunate balance. With TLS, you decide eventually at some point that the problems of still supporting the old, less-secure version are too serious, and so tough luck for people stuck on the old version. With this, I certainly hope it would err much more on the side of not locking people out of the System. (Fortunately, although this particular condition is very rare, there are a much larger number of people that have damaged fingerprints or fingerprints that don’t work in whatever readers get used.)

techsupporter 6y ago
There's no reason any other form of biometrics is less secure than fingerprints. My read of the article is that either the idea of someone not having fingerprints never came up or if that situation was considered it was filed under "we will handle the exceptions via a process to be developed later" and no process was developed. Worse, a process was developed--since we see in the article that some of these people were able to get ID cards and passports, documents requiring fingerprints--but it imposes a massive time barrier on the people. For one-offs like obtaining an ID card, a one-time imposition of a bit more time might be reasonable. "We've installed fingerprint readers at every location where you can apply for an ID card but retina readers are more expensive so they are only available at the main government office" may be fine if you're referring to a passport issued every ten years. But requiring a fingerprint for a SIM card yet having no backup for that at point-of-sale is not. This is the flaw in every single system designed by people who largely have no experience with people who have a difference in physical or mental characteristics than the designers. We see it in facial recognition trained primarily on people of a certain skin pigment. Social systems designed by people who are neurotypical. Transport systems implemented by people assuming a base level of technological or literacy skill. The list goes on. The people doing the designing aren't being inherently mean or malicious, they're simply not thinking. And not thinking is very easy, but makes systems that are very impenetrable to people not included in that thinking.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  > There's no reason any other form of biometrics is less secure than fingerprints. Anything which is a non-standard fallback with limited use is likely to be less secure. Not because the method would be inherently worse, but just because reduced use means that less attention and effort goes into building and maintaining it.

amp180 6y ago

Good catch on the 'disease' bit. Pure ableism.