ID cards: So unreliable they make your eyes water

A Commons home affairs select committee that tried out iris-scanning technology that the government is hoping to use for ID cards found out yesterday that the eyes definitely don't have it.

Contact lenses, long eyelashes, watery eyes and eye complaints will mean as much as seven per cent of UK citizens render the technology useless. The committee witnessed the scanning failures first hand, with one Liberal Democrat MP, Bob Russell, unable to be scanned by the UK Passport service at the trial because of an eye complaint.

Fears over epilepsy were also raised, with one MP voicing the theory that the scans could provoke fits in sufferers due to the moving lights that the scanners use.

However, watery eyes aside, the Passport Service has seen a four per cent failure rate, which it attributes to users not getting their eyes properly aligned with the iris reader.

Opting for a system of fingerprint reading wouldn't be foolproof either. Labourers, pen pushers and others who have rough hands or faint fingerprints will confuse the readers.

Barclaycard earlier trialled fingerprint reading and found the system would reject those who use hand cream, those who gardened a lot, some Asian women who had fine skin and even those with scratches and scars on their fingers.

The technology will be tested on about 10,000 volunteers in locations across England by this August.

If keeping track of the fingerprints and iris scans of the living wasn't hard enough, Home Secretary David Blunkett said earlier this week that the Home Office will be holding onto UK citizens' personal data even after their death to stop fraudsters assuming the identities of the deceased.

Blunkett also warned fraudsters earlier this week that trying to dodge the system by using false identities when registering would land them in a world of administrative pain.

"If [people] provide false papers then they will have to keep that false identity for the rest of their lives," he said, adding that those who used a false identity "better get their true identity pretty quickly otherwise they are going to find themselves in a real mess to establish a real identity for life."