LOCKPORT, N.Y. — Every person on this planet is unique, from personality, to likes and dislikes, to biometrics.

The Niagara County Sheriff’s Office is using that to try and identify people — one of the first in the nation to do so.

The reason? When it comes to pulling people over, things can get tricky, especially when they don’t have identification.

“You're pulling up a picture, looking, confirming," said Michael Filicetti, Niagara County sheriff. "People change their appearances, they change their hair color, the style of their hair, they get tattoos or have tattoos removed, so you're doing your best to say, 'this looks like this could be the person.'” 

Getting it right matters.

“This person could have warrants, they could be a missing person [or] they could be a person of interest in a case,” said Filicetti.

Before, the only way to tell for sure was to bring someone back to the station and fingerprint them.

“Now you're transporting somebody, so there's always a possibility of things going wrong,” he said. 

Now, the sheriff’s office has a new tool in its back pocket: scanning your iris.

The process is pretty simple. If you get pulled over, you come to the back, someone puts a device up to your eyes and an image is taken.

“It's like a fingerprint," said Filicetti. "Everybody's unique.”

How unique? Officials say the odds of your iris being the same as someone else’s are one in 10 to the 78th power. 

Which is why other have concerns.

“You’ve also got to understand the context in which it's used," said Jeramie Scott, the senior council for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "A government or company controlling the biometric information and being able to ID you when they want, versus you having control over your identity and, for instance, submitting an ID card.”

Scott worries about how this tech will expand.

“There's not an overarching regulation of its use," he said. "If we allow biometrics to get entrenched in certain ways, without protections in place, it becomes very hard to add those protections retroactively.” 

The sheriff’s office says scans are only taken if you don’t have, or refuse to hand over, your ID.

Those field scans aren’t saved.

They’re only compared to those already on file if someone’s been to jail.

All that iris data is saved on the B12 Technologies servers, the company that developed this tech. 

“With a biometric technology, it's first important to understand that if it's compromised, you can't change it, and that's part of the risk here,” said Scott.

He hopes for more legislation and transparency surrounding biometric tech and its use.

In the meantime, the sheriff’s office is positive this will help keep the community safe.

“If you're a law abiding citizen and you're carrying your ID, you have zero to worry about," said Filicetti. "If you're a criminal and you're trying to hide your identity, then yeah, you'd probably have something to worry about.” 

Another concern is if someone’s biometrics are in the system because of a charge that was later dropped.

The sheriff’s office says even an order to seal the records wouldn’t clear out fingerprints and iris scans, though there are some exceptions.