Understanding user perspectives on biometric technology

Biometrics has been used for centuries to identify individuals by their own unique physical characteristics. Historically, the fingerprint has served as the most common method of identification. But other properties, which vary in their exactness and in users’ comfort, are also candidates for widespread usage. Today, an increasing number of biometric companies are offering new products to be considered for general deployment beyond security identification systems. Some application objectives for these products include: associating computer users with their computer behavior, linking employees to their workstation performance, managing user-resource usage and activity, and e-commerce. By far, these biometric products have been aimed mostly at providing authentication for an individual to gain access to sensitive information and resources. Biometric technologies are not without problems and come with their fair share of concerns. Some of these concerns are technical in nature, e.g., degradation of biometric features over time, variance in recorded and actual biometric characteristics, and threshold values for authentication. As the technology matures, however, the technical issues will be eventually overcome. On the other hand, many of the technology’s obstacles are based on attitudes and behaviors, related to user acceptance, trust, habits, etc., ultimately presenting a greater challenge for implementation. Previous research found that some of the issues include the domains of privacy, storage and safeguarding of personal identification information, fear of intrusion into an individual’s daily life, as well as concerns related to the relinquishing of personal information.