How Biometrics is Silently Becoming the New Normal [Infographic]

You are patiently queuing to catch the Mets game when you see your colleague from work get into the stadium via an adjacent booth. No queuing and no VIP pass either. Just a simple fingerprint scan (or iris scans for other stadiums) and he avoids all the security checks that will probably keep you in line for the next 20 minutes or so.

Welcome to the bold, albeit silent, world of biometrics. Unlike smartphones and gaming consoles whose release dates are often marked religiously on calendars, only a handful of enthusiasts line up to sample the latest in biometrics tech.

Biometrics has long been dogged with a spate of privacy and implementation issues. These have made it harder for the technology to permeate through society, with wealthy individuals and corporations being the major beneficiaries of advances in this area.

Despite the challenges, a lot still goes on in the world of biometrics. Most banks have fully integrated one or more aspects of biometrics for access control or other areas of operations for security purposes. It's also common to find fingerprint scanners for accessing many buildings, including warehouses and production facilities that deal with sensitive materials.

Smart Devices

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Closer to home, our increasingly expensive gadgets, including smartphones and tablets, are becoming platforms for integrating biometrics on the domestic front. Apple is leading the way with its fingerprint technology on some of its devices, including the iPhone and MacBook. Not to be outdone, Microsoft also integrated fingerprint detection on the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover for access without passwords.

Consumers have often found biometrics easier to use than passwords. Forgotten passwords are among the leading causes of false alarms at home. Plus, with the right tools, hackers can bypass passwords far more easily than biometric devices, which is why biometrics will soon replace passwords as the first line of defense against attackers.

Another smart device, the Nymi bracelet, uses your heartbeat for remote authentication. The Nymi bracelet uses the wearer's ECG pattern to identify the user then uses this unique information to log them into nearby devices and workstations and even let them through doors.

With these emerging technologies, passwords will soon be a phased out as a primary means of security.

Facial Recognition

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Facial recognition has come a long way and is always the one branch of biometrics that has constantly received attention over the past few years. Facebook recently found itself in legal problems after a Facebook user filed a suit against the company's facial recognition feature allegedly because of privacy issues. This will hardly be the last legal battle involving facial recognition as the technology becomes more mainstream and widely available.

Facial recognition is everywhere, literally. The FBI has a collection of over 411 million faces for facial recognition which can be compared to data from public cameras to identify you. Police only need the smartphone-mounted MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System) to identify you from a database.

Private companies are also getting into the facial recognition field for various reasons, including security and workforce management. Companies like Google, Tesco, and digital security provider Avatier have helped bring facial recognition out of movie scripts and into reality.

And as following infographic shows, facial recognition will do more for security than many other fields utilizing this technology.

The Future

The technology behind biometrics is evolving faster than previously imagined. The major challenge lies almost exclusively in the legal and privacy domains where consumers have been reluctant to share personal information.

With these issues sorted, biometrics will undeniably become just one of the many technologies we've allowed into our homes and areas of work.