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Biometrics secure your identity
Customer endorsement
On a personal, individual level there is growing irritation and frustration with passwords and PIN numbers. This is worsened by the inconvenience of carrying responsibly pockets full of keys and ID cards.
The recent public support for customer service innovations that alleviate this burden has been close to one hundred percent. Amongst those introduced: the Nationwide Building Society in the UK, and the Dresdner Bank in Germany have both drawn overwhelming endorsement from customer pilot groups who would much prefer to continue using the iris pattern of the eye as an easier and more secure alternative to the PIN code in automated teller machines (ATMs). However, both trial ATM programs have now concluded and neither institution has overt commercial development plans.
Privacy
The clear advantage in convenience brought by biometrics to customers of everyday services such as self-service banking is to some extent balanced by the open question of personal privacy. The broad class of biometric technologies includes some uses of personal surveillance or forensic investigation. While the face remains a public matter, fingerprint information varies from one vendor system to another with the information usually stored in non-transferable data formats and not as the familiar fingerprint image. The effect of this is to create privacy barriers between systems, helping to counter the misuse of biometric information.
Many biometric developers, particularly in the European Community, are committed to development of personal biometric storage, either through the use of smart cards (standard plastic cards containing a microprocessor chip) or the development of personal systems such as handheld computing or wireless phones.
With these, if the users’ biometric information is stored and maintained in their own possession then at least within personal data protection frameworks a number of political as well as security issues are avoided concerning the centralised storage of personal biometric data. Embedded biometric systems such as micro-electronic fingerprint systems are emerging as front-runners in the effort to deliver technology solutions which address user concerns over the future of personal privacy in a world with widespread biometrics. The areas where you can use stand-alone embedded biometric solutions are nearly endless. A few examples are in;
- car remote controls to access driver preferences,
- police gun holsters to secure that it is the gun owner that uses the gun,
- smart cards to prove that the user is the owner of the card,
- portable computers to secure the typed in information.
Security
Security for the sake of security has never been a very popular battle cry. In the daily management of risk such principles are usually passed over in favour of more tangible steps: incremental improvement with security patches or modest cost savings. The consideration of biometrics at this point has been seen as working against both of these approaches. There were too many unknown factors and too much financial outlay and risk. This has now changed to the point where reconsideration of biometric technology is necessary.
Cost has dropped significantly, and is set to drop even further through deployment of chip-based solutions. With smaller sensors for reading finger patterns, and with integrated processing for biometrics and other functions such as file encryption, the cost is both well within the cost saving equation for user authentication management, and return on investment can be realised within a year shifting the burden away from revenue calculations onto a capital basis.
With this stage in progress achieved, the on-going revenue budget might then be more effectively deployed in the many other areas of system monitoring and maintenance, knowing that with biometrics the technology itself looks after the users.
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