Update: So I have been doing much Googling and can't find an accurate account of that happening. It appears there are some reports of it happening in Maylasia but that was for vehicles. Better yet is that in South Africa they are just blowing up the ATM's or ripping them outhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198626/South-Africa..., which honestly makes more sense.
I did see that Poland is pushing out some new ATM's, that are also used in Japan, that use the pattern of veins instead of finger prints. The state this means the finger has to be attached to the person
If you're willing to cut people's fingers off and then walk to the ATM, you'd be willing to simply rob people in some other much easier and much more reliable way.
It seems that about a year ago someone was considering such ATMs [1]. Are you sure this isn't just the fears of people (as mentioned in the article) blown into urban legend?
[1] http://www.news24.com/Technology/News/Fingerprint-ATMs-Will-...
Shoplifters - get this - will often wait until there isn't someone standing next to them before taking something off the shelf. Sounds like a good go at rationality to me.
Of course rational thieves exist. Not hyper-rational fictional models, but rational. The degree of rationality is a spectrum, as always, and is affected by physical and mental health and various other factors, but if you think rational thieves are a new concept, then you're living in some kind of fantasy world.
Desperate people do desperate things for small, or often no gain.
People are injured or killed all the time over possessions they may or may not have on them.
How many people have escaped genocides with fake passports, or fake laissez-passer?
Worry that biometric will make it harder to escape being sent to the gulag, not that Walmart will deny you store credit.
I'm reminded of https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/IBM.h...
In some ways we have the reverse situation prevailing; people are successfully escaping the genocidal collapse of the middle east into Europe, but are under threat of deportation by increasingly determined immigration enforcement.
pjc50 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705558) says exactly that:
> This may just be price discrimination, which is what people are concerned about in the retail context. Or it may be more extreme. You could use it to deny job applications or credit to anyone who'd been at a political demonstration filmed by police, for example.
http://beforeitsnews.com/christian-news/2014/01/use-cash-tra...
Simply "hiding" your biometrics or banning biometric identification altogether would be moving backwards in the bigger picture, which I'd compare to forbidding evolution research because it's against religious teaching.
The BackStory podcast had a recent episode on the history of surveillance in America:
http://backstoryradio.org/shows/keeping-tabs-2/
Among other topics, one segment discussed how a racist official in Virginia used data collected in the 19th century to protect free African Americans as part of his effort to enforce racial purity laws in the 20th century:
“HELEN ROUNTREE: In the county courthouses, there was another kind of record made, and that was the register of free Negroes. He had to get a certificate stating that they were of free birth, otherwise they could be kidnapped and sold into slavery.
The law about that went in in 1806. Plecker was able to get copies of those registers – every county had one. And then if he got a tip later and he could have his people trace geologically back to a free negro register, he had that present-day person as a person of African ancestry.”
The full segment is worth listening to:
And you can't take them away from other people, nor revoke them when they are "compromised". In particular for faces and voices, they can be used to identify you without your knowledge and consent. That means they can be used to discriminate against you on whatever basis the discriminator chooses. This may just be price discrimination, which is what people are concerned about in the retail context. Or it may be more extreme. You could use it to deny job applications or credit to anyone who'd been at a political demonstration filmed by police, for example.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/val-swain/disrupt...
We have enough trouble with the simple human-recognisable biometric classifier of "race" being used to discriminate against people.