Japanese ATMs To Use Palm Readers In Place of Cash Cards 113
alphadogg writes "A Japanese bank this week said it will introduce ATMs that use palm scanners in place of cash cards. Ogaki Kyoristu Bank said the new machines will allow customers to withdraw or deposit cash and check their balances by placing their hand on a scanner and entering their birthday plus a pin number. The ATMs will initially be installed at 10 banks, as well as a drive-through ATM and two mobile banks. Ogaiki announced the new ATMs with the slogan 'You are your cash card.'"
Hygiene and broken arms. (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to do a ton of work in a colo facility at a previous company. The colo I worked required you to use the hand scanner to get into and out of the "man trap" by the lobby. This was a problem in two ways:
1. To get to the restroom you had to go through the lobby. No telling how many people would use the restroom and then bypass washing their hands, proceeding directly to the hand scanner and back to the datacenter. You had to put your hand on a metal plate and in my 2years working in this colo, I never saw them once clean that thing.
2. About 8 months into my job, I broke my right hand and it required me to wear a hard cast. The hand scanner was not made for your left hand, but your right hand palm down due to the orientation of some plastic finger pegs. So with a broken hand, not only did I have to call security every time I needed to go through a door, but they called a VP every time i entered the facility.
So good luck if you hurt your right hand or don't want to receive the bacteria from the previous users.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hate to reply to self, but:
4) include provisions to change if hacked. (Don't assume it's impossible, if someone manages to "copy" my hand, I want a way to have that access disabled and change to some other way of authenticating, now we get issued new debit cards, I'm not ready to change my hand if someone manages to copy it.)
Old News (Score:2, Interesting)
Japanese banks have been using Hitachi's Jomon (finger vein) authentication system for at least five years. It sounds like Fujitsu found a way to get their inferior biometric product into a few banks.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)
I presume they are using Fujitsu's palm-vein technology (which is already in some ATMs) then #1 isn't a problem as it uses the blood flow through your hand for the reading. It doesn't read the palm print but the actual vein structure within the palm.
I have no idea in regards to how it is handled for #2, we have only really worked with companies that have done School lunch & hospital implementations in the US
For #3, they usually register both hands, although if both are damaged, they still need a backup system.
Re:Technological excess (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't work. Many studies have shown that tougher laws are rarely accompanied by any decrease at all in the activity being regulated.
The problem isn't the severity of the punishment, but the percieved likelyhood of being caught. Seems in general, once you get past a very low threshold, it doesn't matter how severe the punishment, people are either worried they will be caught, and follow the rules, or don't think they will, and break the law.
Note it doesn't matter what the actual likelyhood of being caught is, only the perception. This has been shown in places such as New York where focussing on petty crime (graffitti, jaywalking, etc) caused a reduction in more severe offences, the theory being that the Police were more visible, and more people were talking about being caught, so the perception of what you could get away with changed, even though the overall likelyhood of being caught for the higher offences was largely unchanged, and the punishments were unchanged.
Now back on topic, the sort of crime envisioned here would probably be much less likely to occur than someone stealing a debit/credit card now (It's both a phycological threshold as well as a legal threshold that you would cross from simple theft to assault causing bodily harm, and that will weed out some (most?) criminals, however the severity of the offence is significantly higher, and any criminals left in the group willing to cross that threshold will cause severe damage. That's not a tradeoff everyone is willing to make.
A bad idea that won't go away (Score:4, Interesting)
Using biometric identification for ATMs or for building security has been tried many times, but it always turns out to be complex and unreliable. In the late 90s, banks tried to use iris scanners [lmtonline.com]. In 2001, I worked for a company that used fingerprint scanners for building access, instead of key cards. We often had to try numerous times to get a good thumbprint read, so we could get into the building.
The banks, and my company, both replaced these systems with magnetic stripes or RFID...because those technologies, while not so "cool," were more reliable and cheaper. I predict that this Japanese bank will soon be going back to the old ATM cards.