Unlocked With Proper Eye ID

As the week-long Democratic National Convention comes to a close in Boston, many attendees will undoubtedly walk away with memorable moments. But for some high-profile delegates, party members and celebrities the real eye-opening experiences weren't just at the Fleet Center meeting hall.
To improve security against possible terrorist attacks, the upscale Nine Zero hotel had upgraded its security with an iris-scanning system developed by South Korean giant, LG Electronics.
The so-called biometric system used cameras and computers to capture the unique patterns of an individual iris, the colored portion of human eye, when they check in at the hotel's front desk. Once digitized, the images were stored in a database along with other information about the guest ? name and which room or suite they're staying in, for example.
Cameras at the main entrance and outside every guest room controlled the locks on the doors. Guests, employees, and other pre-screened individuals ? security personnel, for example ? merely peered into the cameras and a computer looks for a matching profile. Once the computer verifies the person's identity and he or she has permission to be in the hotel or that particular suite, the doors unlock.
"[The] LG iris identification technology helps to create a much more secure environment for our guests," says hotel manager Jim Horseman. "It is easier to use than a key, ? a key that you can't go down to a locksmith and duplicate, you can't lose it [and] can't be stolen."
The biometric identification system would also offer the premium hotel other advantages, such as even faster check-in and check-out for regular visitors.
How well the iris system worked during the convention is still under review. But the group that owns the Nine Zero says the technology could appear in its 27 other luxury hotels, resorts and golf clubs throughout the United States.

< As usual, they're trading off privacy for security. While it's a nice concept to protect your things, in this case your room, there's a much bigger issue at stake here. When biometrics are accepted, it makes them easier to accept other places. The security of a hotel room has never been much of a problem. Most thefts occur from the employees who would be able to get in anyway. On the other side of things, Imagine being tracked everywhere you go in everything you do. Do you think the government will not soon require these hotels to keep check-ins updated in a national database? And guess where they'll start.. "you already have the infrastructure in place, all you have to do is let us know" It's time to put as big a brake on biometrics as possible. You can't put Pandora back in her box, but what you Can do is not rush headlong into something with far more negative than positive consequences. As with computers where they add more and more (usually useless) features instead of making the ones they've got work properly, here they need to be insuring that biometrics remain private in every single type of use. Only then will they be a technology that does not decrease our worth as human beings. &gt