Addis Fortune reports that Ethiopia’s “Revenue and Customs Authority (RCuA) has collected about 6,600 taxpayers’ fingerprints in the first week of the about 70 million Br worth National Identification System (NIS) Project, launched early last week under the first round of this project and financed by the World Bank, plans to collect fingerprints from over 1.6 million people in Addis Abeba.” The biometric data is being gathered via mobile registration units. The fingerprints will be combined with other personal information and stored in a government database for taxpayer identification.

Some people are, understandably, wary of the new system:

For instance, Tefera Mengistu, a criminal investigator with Ethiopian Cargo who has been working in the inspection and investigation area for over 10 years, sees potential for the fingerprints to be utilized in criminal investigations, issuing passports or visas, and identifying pensioners. He feared this could lead to potential privacy issues, as people’s information, given for tax purposes, could be used against them.

This is just the initial phase of Ethiopia’s biometric data collection. “Eventually the new system will be launched in different parts of the country and similar data will be collected from tax payers out of Addis Abeba.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 and is filed under Anonymity, Biometrics, Identification, Security, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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