High-tech handgun with 'fingerprint and facial recognition biometrics' only shoots in the hands of authorized users

[GodFearinGunTotin]

I'm not trying to argue by the way, I guess I'm just trying to understand the resistance to something that might not suck.

Here’s my reason: There are politicians all over the country that would love nothing more than to mandate that these “smart guns” are the only guns be allowed for sale. I don’t care if people decide to spend their money on them. Just like EVs, there are always those people that want to be at the leading edge of new technology. They’ll put up with the quirks, breakdowns, and malfunctions just to have or be seen with the latest and greatest. Fine. No skin off my nose. But those politicians waiting to restrict gun options would love nothing more than for that technology to be perfected and accepted. I will not participate in that.

 

[bgcatty]

Libtards and politicians just can’t think of enough stupid, and I mean STUPID, idas when it comes to guns! I’m sure all the miscreants, criminals, psychos, trans and lgbtq people will rush out and buy these guns, right? Just another example of you just can’t cure stupidity!

 

[BackFromDC]

Oh man...as a Biometrics SME who's worked for private industry and a few three letter agencies. This is a dumb idea that should've died in 2012 when it was first euthanized. Nothing about this is novel or secure, the biometrics world has already moved away from firearms mounted micro-capture devices. There is no rEd HeRrInG or StRaWmAn fallacies here...you cannot be fallacious with events that have already happened.

Edit: So this really bugs me since it's in my industry so here's the giant explanation for the tl;dr version I just posted above.

Biometrics, especially face and fingerprint modalities are really not designed for what I call "retail biometrics". Beyond Virginia v Baust, if you use any sort of biometrics at home or on your phone you should disable it. Whenever retail biometrics are used by individuals at home, there's usually a books worth of Terms & Conditions that people just check the box (or unknowingly agree to upon purchasing) and absolves the manufacturer of liability...because the products are pretty bad. On a bad day, 1 out of 3 impostors can get through, on a good day it's 1 out of 10ish. A lot of these retail micro-capture devices lower the matching threshold for the sake of user satisfaction, but also they don't want to burn that R&D money. This is state of the art algorithms and hardware, so right off the bat BioFire is not just a nonsense product but a massive security risk. In a device that's smaller than a mobile phone, there just isn't room for buffing up processing power, and a lot of these retail biometrics don't have self-clearing cache capabilities. Even a big agency like DHS had product development problems like this, and they hired Noblis to develop it...not some second rate developer start-up working out of a west coast garage.

That brings me to the biggest issue with biometrics, its biggest use being identity management, just plain and simply fall under the interest of the state or other large institutions. With the state, it's mostly because of how we declare ourselves and be recognized by the government that serves us (supposed to at least ). Whether it be border control, voter registration, or getting pulled over; the state is the biggest implementer of biometrics. So that's led to two problems - (1) How to protect privacy and (2) Everything for biometrics is developed for large scale. I can't get into (1), it would take forever...let's just say I've never seen Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas agree on something until it was time to tag-team smack down a tech company for violating biometric privacy.

More relevant to biometrics on guns is (2), small self contained biometric systems commonly sold in retail biometrics just aren't good because there's no money in it. It will never be good, there's just no market demand for it. Bio-Key is the only company I know who excels at this and even they admit it's better to tag along a government contract. For those of you who said the alphabet boys should test biometrics first, they did...with Bio-Key fingerprint enabled padlocks for armorers to lock up their guns. They stopped because they didn't see much of added value in it. They did however end up buying more Bio-Key stuff for entry/exit control, but that's another story.

Everything about biometrics is meant to big! Like 100 million plus transactions a day big. Error rates of 0.001% are still considered "catastrophic" for entities like the FBI and Dept of State. All it's security systems, it's privacy controls, it's legal permissibility; they are secured by and agency load worth of government drones (sometimes contractors...Booz Allen or Leidos mostly), and retail biometrics just don't have that to leverage. Hence, why these retail and private use biometric systems are doomed to fail...we never designed them to be this small and self contained.

One last thing that kinda relates to (1)...you can get in trouble for capturing biometrics that are not your own (or of someone you have custody over). The way the law is written now, to protect people's privacy, if someone happens to smack their finger on your biometrically enabled gun/safe/phone/whatever...boom felony, and if it was a kid that's a double felony. You can't willy nilly collect biometrics off someone without a 4 page consent form. Obviously that doesn't generate lawsuits between neighbors on a daily basis (if it did I'd be rich) because there's a thing called burden of proof. Capturing people's fingerprints and self storing .eft files of them is still kind of insecure though...

Now...yall are probably freaking out because you use biometrics with banks, hospitals, and traveling on planes with your passport. Not to worry, you're completely safe with those three. Those three industries may not be government run (two of them aren't at least), but they are large institutions with EVEN MORE resources that they leverage to secure your identity. They are so far advanced of the feds that they started their own standards and compliance because the fed standard wasn't strict enough. Banks and finance have the FIDO Alliance, hospitals and healthcare obviously use HIPPA, and traveling uses ICAO (yes Dept of State issues passports, but even they cannot escape the grasp of ICAO). Archangel Gabriel would sooner sound the trumpets before those three lose your biometric data, so sleep tight with that.