Actually, a fingerprint can't (as far as I know) be digitized and put onto a mag strip. Your licence would have to have an imbedded IC chip to do it. I don't know if they're doing that with any DL's yet but it will come soon.
Well, yeah they can. How they do it is, the biometric reader creates an image which is then transfered as a binary value to the storage device. When you place your finger on the reader the next time the same thing happens but instead of storing the image it reads it from the storage device and the two are compared.
But is there enough space on the typical 3.38" long mag strip (storage device) to record a complete print image?
When I was recently issued a new RFID badge (fingerprint readers to be used in conjunction with it), I was told that there was not enough space on the mag strip for a complete digitized print, so it only stores an incomplete pattern of points of my print that could be compared. They said there was no way (at least with this particular system) that a fingerprint could be reconstructed from the scant data that was stored, but that they do have systems using 'smart cards' (with an IC) that can do so.
Is that not correct?
The amount of data that a standard mag stripe can hold is around 3k as best as I can remember and that is using all three tracks. I would think that you was told correctly as to it just storing partial but when you take into account digital compression I would bet that non critical security applications could and do store the complete print... like time clocks and such....
Matt
