Okay, I'd love to do that. It's really quite simple, though it sounds very complex.
Imagine your pictures being taken or your fingerprints being taken. The normal process involved in facial recognition programs or biometric programs is, as I said, to capture what is called a biometric template, which is a digital representation of the essential features of your face or your finger. That template is what is captured in the database and that is what is used for purposes of comparison.
The problem is, as I said, if the police come knocking on the door with a court order. You have to give them access to the database. They will be able to match that template of your face, the digital representation of your face, with a face that they might have taken a picture of at a crime scene. They get a match, and boom, your information is used for another purpose that was never intended.
Au contraire, with biometric encryption, what does it do that's different? It uses the unique features of your face or your finger to encrypt or code some other data: a PIN number, an alphanumeric, something meaningless, a nonsense number—it doesn't matter. And that biometrically encrypted data, this other data, is what's kept in the database.
So there are two things. If the police come knocking on the door, what do they get? You have to open the database to them. First of all they get nothing, because without your actual face present, one can't decrypt or decode what is in the database. So first of all, they can't get access to it even though you're going to open the doors.
Okay. What if there's a brute force attack? This happens. There are great hackers out there. What if they break into the database? What do they get? They get nothing of value. They don't get your face or your finger. They get this other meaningless nonsense number that was encrypted using the unique features of your face or finger, so they get garbage. Be my guest; they're not going to get anything of value. The beauty of it is that, for the purpose for which it was intended, it works perfectly. And if you go to our website, you'll see that the University of Toronto worked with the OLG, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, to perfect the system. They reached levels of not only privacy but security and accuracy that were unprecedented for biometrics.
The large company Morpho out of Paris, France, which is the leading biometric company in the world—they just bought Sagem, which used to be the leading company; it's now Morpho—is looking at biometric encryption to develop a prototype, a pilot that it's going to be working on in the fall on how we can incorporate biometric encryption into a hardware device or something. So people are looking at this around the world. It's in its infancy.
But the beauty of the OLG example is that I can guarantee to all the regular patrons of the casinos in Ontario that they don't have to worry about their facial images being captured when they go out for an evening's recreation. I can also assure the addicted gamblers who want to be kept out that there will be a much greater success of having their wishes abided by through this program.
The success rate, if you will—it's called the hit rate—of the program of self-excluded people has grown, tripled and quadrupled. Before, we had very little for identifying these poor individuals. Now the success rate is through the roof, and there are something like 15,000 addicted gamblers in the province who have signed up for this program. We can help them do what they want us to do and keep them out, while not impacting the privacy of anyone else. And we've also told these individuals that, while they will be kept out of this program, their information will not be used for any other purpose whatsoever—no secondary use, full stop.