Most People are Comfortable With Biometrics in the Right Circumstances: Study

A new study suggests that the American public is quite willing to use biometric technology. However, that willingness is conditional, to the extent that people are more comfortable with certain use cases than they are with others.

The findings come courtesy of a study published in IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society. The results reflect the responses of a representative sample of 4,048 US adults, captured over the course of two weeks at the tail end of 2020.

Digging into the details, the researchers found that Americans are still most comfortable with fingerprints, though the majority is ultimately ready to embrace any forms of biometrics. 74.8 percent are happy to use fingerprints, while 55.6 percent would submit their DNA. Other modalities fall somewhere in between, with stronger support for voice (66.2 percent) and handprints (63 percent), and less support for face (61.1 percent) and iris recognition (60.6 percent).

The catch is that many people were only comfortable with biometric identification in select situations. Most (67.1 percent) feel fine when using their face or a fingerprint to unlock a smartphone, but a majority are uncomfortable with the thought of retailers tracking people in a store to hit them with targeted advertisements. The respondents were similarly wary of biometrics in customer reward schemes and homeowner association monitoring programs.

Generally speaking, respondents are more willing to trust medical researchers, healthcare providers, and law enforcement and intelligence agencies with biometric data. They were more mistrustful of retailers, tech companies, advertisers, and other government agencies. Having said that, the margins are slim, with just over half of the population sitting with the majority in each case.

Despite evidence of racial bias in some systems, the researchers did not find any significant correlation between characteristics like race and gender and someone’s attitude toward biometrics. They did notice that those who were already familiar with a modality were more comfortable with that technology, though they did not know whether or not exposure made people more comfortable, or if people who were more comfortable were simply more likely to give biometrics a shot.

Those who were uncomfortable with biometric tech cited privacy, government oversight, and data storage and data sharing as their primary concerns. In any case, the researchers found that the use case had a bigger impact on the public’s opinion than the specific modality being used.

Source: Penn State University

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November 25, 2021 – by Eric Weiss