France

Concepts

Identity-related crime concerns in France mainly focus on document and financial fraud. The former arose from the debate on the introduction of a national electronic identification card. The main arguments advanced by the government for such a card mainly rely on the need to fight document fraud. A secure document and handout procedure are foreseen as an adequate means to combat false identity documents and the use of false identities based on authentic documents.

Concerns with regard to financial fraud and more particularly credit card fraud arise from the fact that 80% of on-line payments are done by credit cards, which are also largely used as identifiers in e-commerce. A report issued by the Observatory for Payment Card Security [Observatoire de la sécurité des cartes de paiements] showed that the amount of fraudulent payments by credit card amounted to 252,6 M€ in 2006. Some attention has also been brought to the problem raised by phishing as several French banks and their clients have been victims of such practices, which ignited a strong response.

It follows that the debate mainly relates to what FIDIS researchers identified as “unlawful identity takeover”, i.e. the “fraud or another unlawful activity where the identity of an existing person is used as a target or principal tool without the person’s consent” and, to a lesser extent, unlawful identity delegation or creation.

In view of these threats, public and private actors have tried to give appropriate answers to identity-related crimes, whose concerns have been revived by the rise of the Internet and the spread of new technologies. Legal, technical and organisational measures have been taken by public authorities, financial institutions and online merchants to fight identity fraud and empower citizens to prevent or defend themselves against abuses.

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D12.10: Normality Mining: Results from a Tracking Study

Within FIDIS, WP3 and WP12 have dealt with RFID, WP11 has investigated
mobility and identity while WP6 has examined biometrics and WP7 profiling.
The aim of this report is to bring these disparate threads together into a tangible
study which will demonstrate privacy issues surrounding products and services
which are likely to start emerging on to the consumer market.
New generations of mobile handsets, with integrated devices like GPS and
internet capabilities, are becoming less like traditional phones. In fact we
should stop viewing them as simply mobile phones - they are now more like
mobile computers which can make phone calls. These advances in mobile
technologies will inevitably lead to new services which we can enjoy anywhere,
anytime. Location Based Services which utilise the phone’s GPS to tell us for
example where we are, or where the nearest cinema is, are an obvious first step
– but what happens if the phone monitors where we go at all times? Can these
new services build a picture of who we are based on where we have been? Can
they use this profile of us to understand what we like and tailor their results
specifically to us? And if so, at what cost to our privacy? In this report, aimed
at the potential consumers of such services, we will look at results from a recent
tracking study which examines these issues.

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