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Since 9/11, biometric IDs have become all the rage – but not everyone wants their picture, fingerprint or voice stored on a card, say, where anyone can see or copy it. IBM suggests a way around this in US patent application 2004/19570. The mugshot, fingerprint, voiceprint or iris map is captured in the usual way, then deliberately distorted by means of a secret code. So the card bears a distorted face or fingerprint, or garbled voiceprint. At the security desk, a terminal extracts the encrypted code from the card’s memory to get rid of the distortion.