IDair's new fingerprint reader captures prints from 6 meters away (al.com)
By Lee Roop, The Huntsville Times
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- Forget the key card to your office building? Just wave your hand at the door, and you're in. "You don't have to stop at a station. Nobody checks your ID. You just walk through," explains Clemson-educated physicist Joel Burcham of his new Huntsville company called IDair.
IDair makes a machine that Burcham says can photographically capture a fingerprint from as far away as six meters in enough detail to match against a database. Add facial and iris-recognition technology, Burcham said, and you have the basis for a good biometrics system that can control access to any building or room within a building.
Who needs this level of security? "Sooner, rather than later, we're all going to need it," Burcham said in a recent interview at his office at Huntsville's HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.
HudsonAlpha, known for human genome and other biological research, gave Burcham a desk for his startup company - "one desk," he said - because Burcham plans to expand to latent print imaging, a process that involves biological questions of the kind routinely investigated at HudsonAlpha.
Currently, IDair's customers are military. The system can be used, for example, to tell the difference between friendly locals and potential terrorists while soldiers stay safe behind blast walls.
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more: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2012/06/idairs_new_fingerprint_reader.html
Hoo boy -- this has all kinds of implications for privacy rights. Your fingerprints are not yours any more, they belong to every business whose property you enter.
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