Korean biometrics and security tech company Suprema will be brining its biometric time and attendance tracking technology to a major coffee chain in the United Arab Emirates. The Caribou Coffee chain will see Suprema’s BioLite Net IP fingerprint terminals installed throughout 50 locations in the country.
The move has been implemented primarily for the purpose of improving efficiency and accuracy, having been selected by Al-Sayer Holding, a trading company that Caribou Coffee has hired to help it with it expansion efforts in the Middle East and Turkey. That reasoning is fairly typical, as many other companies have, in recent months, sought to improve organizational efficiency with biometric attendance tracking technology. In a press release, Suprema explained that its BioLite Net system “will collect reliable data that will be centralized in the corporate office and uses the benefits of an automatic biometric system to efficiently manage a dynamically altering workforce.”
It’s worth noting that another recently announced deployment of biometric attendance tracking has caused an uproar and some major push-back from the city workers upon whom it was being imposed in San Francisco. Those individuals are concerned with privacy violations and the risks of security breaches against their biometric data. But it’s also a very different cultural and socioeconomic setting, with a strong union agitating on those workers’ behalf. In private workplace scenarios, this kind of technology has tended to provoke relatively little concern among staff, and moreover the UAE is increasingly employing biometric technology on a large scale, which could indicate a different cultural outlook towards such biometric deployments.
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March 3, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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