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Survey says young people ready to replace passwords with biometrics

| Stephen Mayhew
Categories Biometrics News
 

A new survey commissioned by Visa Europe reveals that 76% of 16- to 24-year-olds are ready to replace passwords with biometric authentication methods such as facial recognition, fingerprint and retina scanning, according to a report by The Telegraph.

Seventy-six percent of the 2,000 UK adults surveyed said they would feel comfortable making a payment using biometric security while 69% felt that the authentication method would make their lives faster and easier.

Survey respondents said that they would prefer using fingerprint scanning over all the other biometric payment methods available to consumers, with 70% predicting that this will be the primary form of identification by 2020.

The report also found that 39% of respondents are interested in using retina scans and 27% opted for facial recognition. Meanwhile, the less popular biometric methods were fast DNA samples with 15% and implanted chips with 16%, fast DNA samples with 15% and voice recognition with only 12%.

“We have more logins and passwords than ever to help keep us secure online and on the high street, but for Gen Z it just feels like an unnecessary burden,” said Jonathan Vaux, executive director at Visa Europe. “Biometric authentication using fingerprint recognition or retinal scans offers an ideal solution, combining unique security and ease of use. As products come online with these features integrated, we expect to see multiple passwords as the industry standard begin to decline.”

The survey also found that 16- to 24-year-olds are more likely than older age groups to use only a single PIN number (32%) or password (14%) when securing their personal data.

The survey also revealed that this younger generation is more liberal in sharing their security information than older generations, with 34% admitting to having shared their debit or credit card PIN number with a third-party, 32% admitting to having shared their smartphone password, and 22% admitting to having shared their Internet banking password.

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16 Replies to “Survey says young people ready to replace passwords with biometrics”

  1. Why on earth do they endeavour to bring down security by putting biometric sensors on the phones, tablets and PCs which have been somehow protected by passwords?

    Threats that can be thwarted by biometric products operated together with fallback/backup passwords can be thwarted more securely by passwords only.

    Whether static, behavioural or electromagnetic, biometric products are generally operated together with a password by OR/Disjunction (as against AND/Conjunction that is common for 2-factor authentication) so that users can unlock the devices by passwords when falsely rejected by the biometric sensors. This means that the overall vulnerability of the product is the sum of the vulnerability of biometrics (x) and that of a password (y). The sum (x + y – xy) is necessarily larger than the vulnerability of a password (y), say, the devices with Touch ID and other biometric sensors are even less secure than the devices protected only by a weak password.

    These biometric products might look more secure in appearance, but it is just a false sense of security. Many of the consumers, who are trapped in the false sense of security, may well be piling up more of their information assets in the cyber space while some of the criminals, who are aware that those consumers are now less secure, may well be silently waiting for the pig to be fat.

    False sense of security about a threat could be even worse than the threat itself. It is a conundrum how it is possible for so many security professionals to remain indifferent to such a nightmarish situation.

    Reply

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