Unisys Study: Trust Crucial For Biometrics

Nearly 70 percent of consumers worldwide support using biometrics technologies such as fingerprints or voice recognition administered by a trusted organization (e.g., a bank, healthcare provider or government organization) as a way to verify an individual’s identity, according to “new global research” from Unisys Corporation.

Unisys Corporation is a vendor of biometric technologies.

In what Unisys officials are calling “the first worldwide survey of its kind to study consumer security preferences,” the Unisys research also “found that 66 percent of consumers worldwide also favored biometrics as the ideal method to combat fraud and identity theft as compared to other methods such as smart cards and tokens.”

This finding shows a slight increase from separate research that Unisys conducted in September 2005, company officials say, which found “61 percent of consumers worldwide favored biometrics as the preferred method to fight fraud and identity theft.”

The Ponemon Institute, a firm that specializes in privacy and security research, conducted the survey on behalf of Unisys. They sent invitations to 16,683 adult-aged individuals throughout the world, via e-mail or letter, from which it received 1,661 usable responses, resulting in an overall 9.96 percent response rate.

Anecdotal evidence found elsewhere supports the idea that the general public is overcoming its instinctive distrust of biometrics, as long as who’s holding the information and what purpose it will be used for are well understood.

Additional interesting findings on biometrics include:

* Convenience was the top reason for biometrics support with 82 percent citing the benefit of not having to remember separate passwords or other login data. More than three quarters of consumers cited improving the speed of the identity verification process as their primary reason for using biometrics.

* Consumers from North America support biometrics for identity verification more than any other region (71 percent), followed by Europe (69 percent) and Asia Pacific (68 percent). In contrast, Latin Americans were the least supportive (58 percent).

* Voice recognition is the most favored authentication method, cited by 32 percent of respondents, followed by fingerprints (27 percent), facial scan (20 percent), hand geometry (12 percent) and iris scans (10 percent), perhaps reflecting more consumer awareness of and experience with voice and fingerprint biometrics.

* North Americans are significantly less supportive of facial scans compared to other regions, with only 10 percent citing it as the preferred method, compared to 27 percent consumers in Europe, 23 percent in Asia Pacific and 20 percent in Latin America.

* Of those respondents who did not favor biometrics for identity verification, almost three quarters (74 percent) were suspicious of the technology, followed by 62 percent who cited they prefer to give non-biometric identification methods.

Unisys has opened a new biometrics research center in Brussels, which joins its other location in Reston, Virginia. The company hopes to sell biometrics technologies for such products as e-passports and other travel and customs applications, as well as identity verification in healthcare records, financial data, law enforcement and other situations.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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