Terrence Gold

Los Angeles

Client Executive

Good article but a little off the mark. I have been on both the IT application side in the fortune space, and worked for a biometric and directory companies.

There are MANY flaws with Biometrics. I have seen the ugly things that they do not tell the customer. What is more scary, are the things that they do not know because they are not application developers, and that, at the end of the day is what needs to be protected.

Banks fear 2 things. 1) the rogue capture of an image which would enable one to have a piece of someone's identity for the rest of their life. Fingerprints dont change and can't be reset like passwords or be reissued like smart cards. 2) user experience. If MasterCard processes 100,000 transactions per second and biometrics has a failure rate (let's say 1 in 10,000 which is generally what is claimed but I say it this is stretched) then you would have many people not able to transact affecting merchant's and financial processor's business. This also create's a poor user experience and floods customer service. So they won't really do it.

Biometrics are great in concept, even applicable in some situations, but widely miss the mark in the networked world. Additionally, when implimenting as a security measure, as opposed to convenience (no one loses their finger) I would never use biometric as the only credential. Such instances would always lead to a higher rate of access to malicious users.