Biometrics: An Overview on New Technologies and Ethic Problems

The term biometrics is derived from the Greek words: bio life and metrics to measure. "Biometric technologies" are defined as automated methods of verifying or recognizing the identity of a living person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic. Several techniques and features were used over time to recognize human beings several years before the birth of Christ. Today, this research field has become very employed in many applications such as security applications, multimedia applications and banking applications. Also, many methods have been developed to strengthen the biometric accuracy and reduce the imposture errors by using several features such as face, speech, iris, finger vein, etc. From a security purpose and economic point of view, biometrics has brought a great benefit and has become an important tool for governments and institutions. However, citizens are expressing their thorough worry, which is due to the freedom limitations and loss of privacy. This paper briefly presents some new technologies that have recently been proposed in biometrics with their levels of reliability, and discusses the different social and ethic problems that may result from the abusive use of these technologies.