Biometrics Claw Their Way to Adoption

摘要

Since June, some frequent travelers at Orlando International Airport in Florida have found a quicker route through security checkpoints. They insert a smart card into terminals at the checkpoints, then submit to a scan of their fingerprints or iris patterns. If the biometric data captured by the scanner matches data stored on the card, they pass through. At least 8,000 travelers have paid $79.95 to sign up for the Registered Traveler program called "Clear" in the first three months, and the airport expects that 30,000 will enroll by year's end, says a spokeswoman for the Greater Orlando Airport Authority. In an increasingly security-conscious age, the combination of smart cards and biometrics seems like a natural. Biometrics arc digital representations of your physical characteristics, which means no one else should be able to mimic them. Putting the data on a smart card means it is under your control and always available when you want to identify yourself. The alternative is to store the biometric data on a host computer, but that data might not be accessible if the network fails. And that host computer scenario poses the risk of someone breaking into the database and stealing personal data.