If you have to be subjected to surveillance, identification and security profiling, might as well have a shiny iPhone in the mix to make the erosion of your privacy rights that much easier to stomach. That's the scenario now that Animetrics' iPhone facial recognition product, iFace, is in limited release (per the Manchester Union Leader). Paired with the company's FIMS facial characteristics database, the iPhone app will allow law enforcement or military personnel to do field analysis of facial snapshots and possibly identify persons of interest.

While there are already portable devices that can be used to measure other biometric identifiers (iris imaging, fingerprints and the like), iFace is the first handheld product that will do facial feature recognition. Most of the testing for iFace has been done under controlled imaging conditions, so it's not clear yet how well the tool will perform in the real world.

The first thing I do whenever I get new Apple gear is think to myself, 'How can I void the warranty?' Usually I just dunk the machine in a vat of butter milk, but edahc is a little more creative than I am (and handier with a dremmel it would seem). He installed a fingerprint scanner in his new MacBook Pro, and documented the whole process in case you're as paranoid and handy as he is.

Let us know if you try this yourself.

[via Digg]

Today LaCie introduced  the Safe Mobile Hard Drive with fingerprint access. To gain access to the drive's contents, the user just swipes his/her finger across the incorporated scanner to unlock the drive's contents. The voodoo that allows this to work is embedded into the drive itself, so nothing needs to be installed onto the host computer.

My only two questions are, first, will Apple ever adopt this technology and, more importantly, will we get The Six Million Dollar Man in our ads, too?