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USERS FEEL SAFER WITH BIOMETRICS

Philadelphia (USA). The Unisys group has recently promoted a research underlining that most users believe in the effectiveness of biometric systems as a potential alternative solution to other security systems. This research was carried out on British and American consumers declaring themselves in favour of the use of biometric technologies both to enhance frontier controls – i.e. identification of individuals through physical features like fingerprints, face features, hand morphology – and to protect information and personal data.As regards the IT sector, most American (63%) and British consumers (87%) believe that the main threats, doomed to grow in the future, are connected to identity theft. There is the common feeling that financial institutes and institutions do not do enough to hinder such cases. In the light of such statements, a higher percentage of consumers (92% in UK and 69% in the US) wish that banks, credit card managers, hospitals and public authorities might adopt biometric technologies as a valid alternative solution to the use of smart card readers, tokens and passwords/PIN codes in order to check individual identities quickly and effectively. Data emerging from the research mirror what Unisys stated last year after a study carried out on the occasion of the 15th edition of World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT). At the time, about 70% of consumers declared themselves in favour of the use of biometric technologies to fight identity frauds and thefts and stressing, among the main advantages of biometrics, its practicalness and rapidity in the identity control process.

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