Biometric comapnies try to wed security with customers' convenience

Biometrics should take on greater importance in the consumer world to protect against identity theft, but first, businesses must overcome the reluctance of some of their customers toward the technology. People are familiar with biometric technologies such as retinal and fingerprint scans, but Dallas News’s Pamela Yip writes that other technologies go beyond those. Take Salt Lake City, Utah-based Identica Holdings. The company’s solution verifies a person’s identity by the unique vascular patterns on the back of his or her hand. The technology captures and encrypts the patterns. A person places his hand in front of a scanner and the vascular pattern is matched to a stored template, which quickly verifies the person’s identity.

Yip writes that it is important constantly to expand the scope of biometrics because crooks are always trying to circumvent safeguards the good guys erect. In a just-released survey, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said 8.3 million people, or 3.7 percent of the U.S. adult population, were victims of identity theft in 2005. The typical loss was $500, but 10 percent of consumers said criminals obtained $6,000 or more. Overall, fraudsters caused $15.6 billion in identity-theft- related losses in 2005. The survey also found that thieves obtained more goods and services — and victims spent more time and money recovering — in cases where the thief opened new accounts rather than only hijacking existing accounts. The study conducted 4,917 random telephone interviews between 27 March and 11 June 2006.

“If we combine all the factors — huge continuing identity-fraud losses due to inadequate technology, fines, high costs to repair identity fraud, high costs of announcing and fixing identity theft for companies, new laws to protect against terrorists and secure our borders and loss of revenue from users who refuse to buy online