You Can't Forget This Password
Hint: It's your face, iris, or fingerprint
My husband is drowning in computer passwords. Let's count them: At the office, he needs one to log on to his computer. Another to access his corporate E-mail. Three for separate databases within his company, one for a legal research database (he's a corporate lawyer), and two to get information on his retirement plan and benefits. When he gets home, he needs a password to log on to our home computer, and a handful more to use online services. There's the password for Amazon.com and other online merchants. To get cash from an ATM, he needs his personal identification number.
PC maker Compaq Computer thinks it has a partial solution to this new bane of modern life. Using optics and software supplied by Identicator Technology, a division of Sunnyvale, Calif.,-based Indentix, Compaq recently became the first big, mainstream marketer to offer an inexpensive fingerprint reader for corporate computer networks. With a unique fingerprint as a password, corporations can be sure that a person logging on to a computer network is who he or she claims to be. In the past five months, Identicator has sold more than 80,000 of the devices through Compaq and other companies.
That you? Biometric technology--which uses unique human characteristics such as fingerprint, voice, face, or iris patterns to verify a person's identity--is making rapid inroads into corporate America. Jackie Fenn, an analyst at the Gartner Group, predicts that within three or four years, about one third of all corporations will use fingerprint readers or some other kind of biometric device.
The scramble to commercialize biometrics stems primarily from changes in how companies organize their information technology. The 1990s switch to network computing, which moved important data from mainframe computers to servers, increased the flow of information within a company. But in the process, it made that information more vulnerable to theft and tampering. A recent FBI survey found that system penetration by corporate outsiders and unauthorized access by corporate insiders are both on the rise.
Corporate networks are not the only potential commercial application for biometrics. Credit card issuers want to reduce losses from fraud. In small tests this spring, MasterCard will begin using fingerprints as a substitute for a signature. "Biometrics holds the ultimate security key to future payment systems," says Joel Lisker, a MasterCard senior vice president. The explosion of E-commerce has also created a gigantic need to authenticate the identity of buyers.
The price of biometric devices has plummeted. Five years ago, the smallest fingerprint reader sold by Identicator Technology was the size of a telephone and cost $2,000; today it's the size of two sugar cubes and sells for $99. In five years, a similar gizmo may cost $15.
It's likely that more than one biometric technology will emerge. Fingerprinting will snag the lion's share in the fast-growing corporate computer network market, says a recent report by market researchers Frost & Sullivan. But technology using voice identification can be easily integrated into already existing telephone services, like automated call centers that answer queries about credit cards, bank accounts, and benefits. Facial recognition technology has its advantages, too. When Mr. Payroll Corp. (now called innoVisions) wanted to automate its check-cashing kiosks two years ago, it chose facial recognition developed by Miros over fingerprinting because of the latter's law enforcement connotations.
The ultimate goal for biometrics manufacturers is to get into the homes of millions of consumers, with the PC being the likely point of entry. About 7 percent of all new PCs, including some laptops, are already equipped with cameras, a harbinger that facial recognition may eventually play a role on the Web.
But privacy concerns are a big hurdle. Consumers may decide that using a face or a fingerprint as a password will jeopardize privacy more than protect it. My husband, for one, has no problem with the idea of using a fingerprint reader at the office or at home. But he finds "something slightly creepy" about using such devices in a public place like a bank. Biometric marketers, take measure of that.
This story appears in the May 17, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.