#5 State of Your Research Prospectus (freewrite, 10 minutes)

My thinking has come very far just from the start of the topic. In the beginning I knew I wanted to do something related to Biometrics, as that has always interested me since the day that Professor Heishman introduced it to the class. From this fairly vague topic I had to then research into some of the more narrow topics within this field. I had previous knowledge of security and privacy being problems with this system, and thought that that would be a very manageable topic considering these methods are closing in on the general population fast, and they will more than likely be implemented in most place within the nextseveral years. Knowing that security and privacy are problems, I started hypothesizing different questions regarding that subject, making sure to keep on that single narrow subject. With this I found that the question should involve some sort of new "method" for guarding the general public against the security and privacy concerns of biometrics, after all, almost all Computer Science journals that I have read propose some sort of alternative method that gets the job done in a much more efficient way. From this question it was fairly easy to devise the problem since the question was initially derived from a problem that the population was having. Using the question the problem was very straightforward and concerned how people felt towards the security and privacy problems and how those people can be put at risk by using biometrics.


Although I haven't really started the review of the literature, I feel this won't be a very hard part. Most of the general information concerning biometrics is widely available, and in fact I have already found many sources using the keywords "Biometrics & Privacy" which will help me in my methodological literature review. In developing my literature review, I have learned to make the subject as broad as possible so that the audience will be able to tell that I have "done my homework" concerning the topic at hand. With this in mind I plan to take a thematic approach of the methods used in biometrics, jumping around to the most prominent topics in biometrics by explaining how some of the more famous theories have been derived and are used in everyday biometrics.

#4 Refine Your Research Topic/Question/Problem (freewrite, 10 minutes)

1. How can we utilise and advance biometrics while still insuring personal privacy of citizens?

First I would like to start with refining my research problem.  I really wanted to stick with something that deals with the privacy part of biometrics.  For example, I am fairly curious as to what companies or other agencies actually do with the biometric data. One refined question could be:

I am studying the advancement of biometrics with respect to the privacy of the individuals who use the system because I want to find out how the entities that implement these systems can use the biometric data against the user in order to help the user understand how their privacy is being violated and what new things can be done to fix the problem.

Possible answers would be the subject that I have heard of in class (but not researched) which is called cancelable biometrics.  We all know that our own biometric data cannot be changed because we cannot just change our fingerprints, but with this new method the security system would implement some sort of hashing or manipulation algorithm which would safeguard the user from even having to lose their biometric data in the first place.  As for the issues of their privacy being used against them, the companies that create these security systems should also do algorithms which hide important data from the company.  This would then safeguard the user from racism or other privacy-eluding acts that would allow the company to figure out the users color, race, gender, and in some highly technological security systems, their thoughts.

Another issue that I would like to get into would be the issue regarding the national DNA database for newborns.  Although this doesn't seem like biometrics, under the shell it is being used as an uniquely identifiable source, which categorizes it as biometrics.