mother's maiden names...

[Alexander Klimov]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Why is it, then, that banks are not taking digital photographs of
> customers when they open their accounts so that the manager's computer
> can pop up a picture for him, which the bank has had in possession the
> entire time and which I could not have forged?

While we are very good at recognizing somebody we know on a picture,
it is in fact very hard to answer the following question: is the
person in front of you is the same person who is depicted on the
photo? AFAIR there were experiments which show that if you just get a
random photo of a person with the same race, age, and gender as you
have you have very good probability to successfully pretend that you
are the person on the picture. As a result the criminal don't really
need to change the photo to be able to pretend that he is you.

-- 
Regards,
ASK

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