Fingerprint-touchscreen
technology
Not just the domain of
secret agents in thrillers, fingerprint-touchscreen technology will soon be
making its way into the lives of everyday people like you and me. That’s if the
new biometric technologies infiltrating society have their way – doing away with
those pesky passwords forever.
Not just for banks and police
stations
While fingerprint-touchscreen
technology has yet to see widespread adoption in smartphones and other mobile
devices, such a time is not far off. In case you missed it, Apple just announced
that they will be unveiling a new iPhone next month featuring a fingerprint
reader in anticipation of wider acceptance of the technology, which could be
used for more secure payments and easier access to files in the cloud.
Indeed, companies such as
FibeRio, Gemalto, Morpho, and Oberthur Technologies have already developed
biometric technologies such as fingerprint scanning, retina scanning and facial
recognition for banks and government, and they predict that in the future we
will be seeing a lot more passports and ID cards containing biometric data,
which could be used for everything from paying subway fares to storing parking
tickets.
Morpho’s systems are also being
used to identify passengers at airport gates and even help catch criminals
through the use of tattoo recognition. Clearly, the James Bond future is
already upon us.
Where it’s leading us in the
future
Given the promise of fingerprint
technology and its wide application, the race is now on among mobile-device
manufacturers to catch up with Apple. Experts are saying that the recent
adoption of a fingerprint reader by Apple will herald in a new era of
smartphones, much like their revolutionary touchscreen did in 2007.
With mobile payments predicted to
soar to $721 billion by 2017, it seems that fingerprint-touchscreen technology
is arriving just in time. Offering quicker and more secure transactions than
regular passwords, fingerprint ID-ing for mobile and other transactions is
likely to become the de facto standard in the not-too-distant future.
More secure than passwords
While some may grimace at yet
another technological advance that seems to bypass or minimize human involvement (for example, those self-service grocery store checkouts that
always seem to malfunction), fingerprint technology promises to be far more
secure than ordinary passwords.
Unlike passwords, which are
subject to theft, hacking and memory loss, personal traits are hard to lose or
forget, not to mention notoriously hard to copy – and for this reason they are
considered more secure than old-fashioned keys or passwords.
And if the technology really
takes off, which by all indications appears likely, one day keys, credit cards
and even driver’s licences may be a thing of the past as fingertips take over
the world.
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