Knoxville News-Sentinel

Fingerprints dubbed currency of the future

December 1, 2003
By Larissa Brass

Companies like BioPay see your fingerprint as the currency of the future.

BioPay's devices, now installed in six of 11 Knoxville-area Bi-Lo grocery stores, use fingerprint scans to identify patrons who visit the store to cash payroll checks.

The company also sells a product that uses customer fingerprints to pay for items from their checking accounts.

One day soon, said BioPay spokeswoman Robyn Porter, customers will be able to pick up dry cleaning, pay for a prescription and buy groceries with only one system of payment - their fingerprint.

"You can leave your wallet in the car," Porter said.

Fingerprinting is the most common of biometric technologies, which use a person's physical characteristics like fingerprints, hand geometry, facial features, irises or retinas or voice qualities for identification.

From logging onto desktop computers to clocking in at work to buying mayonnaise, the business of biometrics is growing.

The International Biometric Group, a trade organization of companies that develop biometric technology, estimates that a $601 million biometrics market in 2002 will grow to $4 billion by 2007. In 2003, nearly $1 billion was spent on biometric technology. Fingerprinting made up 50 percent of those revenues.

In the retail sector, which includes stores like Bi-Lo, the IBG projects this year's $32 million in biometric revenues will grow to $285 million by 2007.

"I think we'll see more and more people using it," said Trevor Prout, director of marketing for the International Biometric Group. "It certainly offers convenience benefits to the customer."

But not everyone is smitten with biometrics' benefits.

Lee Tien is senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group.

He agrees that convenience will drive consumers to accept biometrics technologies, such as BioPay's fingerprinting device.

But, he said, that just puts another piece of personal information on computer systems, some of which are inevitably vulnerable to attack.

Because fingerprints simply become another piece of electronic data, they can be stolen in the same manner as your Social Security number, only with potentially worse consequences.

"It doesn't matter what the piece of information is, if your life ends up being dependant on the secrecy of that information or you're the only one that can produce it, it becomes an invaluable thing to compromise," Tien said. "If you're not really, really careful about how you handle it, you have a single point of massive vulnerability."

The technology itself is also prone to error, he said. In the case of fingerprints, it can be difficult to get a detailed scan from an electronic read, Tien said. In addition, a number of factors can affect follow-up prints and create difficulty when trying to match subsequent fingerprints with prints stored in the database.

But BioPay's Porter said instead of compromising privacy, the company's products protect it.

According to Porter, the more times a customer has to produce personal information, the more opportunities it creates for that information to be intercepted.

"When you go to write a check today in the store, your check is handled by seven different people," Porter said.

Using biometrics can reduce the number of times separate people see that data.

Porter said that Hollywood has also given people an unrealistic picture of how easy it is to gain and transfer biometric information.

"First of all, I think people think that fingerprints are being slung around the network," she said. "That's absolutely not true."

The computer capturing the fingerprint creates an algorithm, or numerical identifier, to represent it, not an actual image of the print, she said, "so it's the numbers that are being compared."

Secondly, she said, information gathered at one location is never shared with another unless something illegal, such as fraudulent check cashing, takes place.

"There are definitely those (privacy) concerns and they are valid concerns and all of that, but I think it's because (consumers) watch too many movies," Porter said. "There's just too much James Bond out there. We are just allowing people to easily cash their checks and if they have a negative history we're alerting the merchant."

Despite concerns expressed by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tien said a society where "you are your own ID" is the wave of the future.

"Today, it's my view that" people's concerns are "not about security," he said. "It's about convenience."