gHacks technology news » identity minister http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Another Story From The Land Where Everything Is Possible http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/06/another-story-from-the-land-where-everything-is-possible/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/06/another-story-from-the-land-where-everything-is-possible/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:03:13 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/06/another-story-from-the-land-where-everything-is-possible/ The favorite country for funny tech stories has to be the United Kingdom. Government officials seem to lose confidential data all the time, be it in front of pubs or by selling it on eBay. Well, the next too good to be true story is that they spend 4.7 Billion British Pounds for new biometric identity cards that contain additional information about every citizen like fingerprints, facial scans. The funny part of the story begins now.

There is not a single card reader in Great Britain – with the exception of prototypes probably – that can read the new cards. This essentially means 4.7 Billion pounds well spend on a piece of plastic that does not serve any other purpose than a standard old fashioned ID. One would think that the production of card readers would be set to the highest priority. This is seemingly not the case as Identify Minister Meg Hillier mentioned that “there’s no prospect in the immediate future for the government directing anybody [...] to buy those things”.

Minister Hillier did point out that the British government will not direct anybody to purchase card readers in the near future. They do expect on the other hand that organizations will start buying card readers once a critical mass has been reached.

via Dailytech

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