Biometrics :: essays research papers

Biometrics   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Biometrics is â€Å"a branch of biology that studies biological phenomena and observations by means of statistical analysis† (Dictionary.com WordNet  ® 2.0,  © 2003 Princeton University). In other words Biometrics is the study of the human body natural identification, now a days corporations use biometrics instead of a simple code. Also police and other federal and worldwide associations use biometrics to stop criminals and to keep track of where criminals are and who they really are. Biometrics has been around for hundreds upon hundreds of years, from when the Chinese first used it to identify children with footprints, to the more advanced salinity recognition that has been developed for today. The use of Biometrics and the technologies that have come from it has made security much more advanced, but it’s getting to the point that maybe even the technology of Biometrics is intruding our privacy.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  One of the first known cases of humans using biometrics to identify one another was by early Chinese merchants. Joao Barros, wrote that the Chinese merchants used the first noted form of biometrics by stamping children’s palm and footprints on paper with ink. By doing this, the Chinese solved a way to tell apart young children from one another. This is one of the earlier of not the first noted case of the use of Biometrics; it is still used today when children are born. Though biometrics has been used throughout the world it never became a popular practice until a man named Alphonse Bertillion decided to fix the problem of identifying convicted criminals. The problem with identifying criminals that were captured again was that the criminals often gave different aliases each time they were arrested. This would keep them from receiving the larger sentence for being a repeat offender. He realized that even if a criminal changed his name, cut his hair or put on weight, certain elements of the body wouldn’t change. This led him to form a method of measuring the more noticeable parts of a person’s body, the parts of the body that never changed during their life such as the size of the skull or the length of their fingers. This system was called anthropometrical signalment and was very basic in its accomplishment. Whenever a person was arrested they were sent through a series of tests that recorded the length and distinguishable marks of thei r bodies. This was all recorded on a card and filed away in groups with similar test results.