Biometric seemed to be everywhere these days even in budget smartphones but biometrics are an extremely insecure method of authentication. First need to take a look at how biometrics works and how biometrics are similar to password tokens in the sense that they remove the need for you to remember a password.
Biometrics are a little bit better in the sense that you can’t lose your fingerprint unless some tragic accident but now a days most biometric systems don’t actually store picture of your fingerprint or a picture of your face instead they represent your fingerprint or your face as a number or rather a token like hashes.
You’ve probably heard that everyone has unique fingerprint or face ID and this is true so everyone should have a unique number associated with their biometrics right? But that’s not the case! Your fingerprint and face can have so many subtle changes throughout the day there could be hundreds or even thousands of valid inputs to authenticate with biometrics even tough lot of companies made so much progress to solve this issue but still not perfect.
Hackers don’t have to figure out the exact input like he would with hacking a password all he needs is to get close enough to hack your biometrics.
Practically hacking biometrics is actually much easier than you may think to obtain somebody’s biometric like you touch hundreds of things in your daily life and a lot of the services you touch are very easy to lift your fingerprints from like the shiny side of a CD-ROM or drinking glass any regular person with a good camera and some kind of chemical on some surface. It’s just a matter of time for them to reproduce your fingerprint on a digital print.
How social media use biometrics
Think for a moment if you use Instagram Facebook or any other type of social media how many pictures of your fingerprints exist out there on the internet waiting to be used by a hacker taken with very high-resolution photos that we all have on our smartphones that anybody can easily lift the fingerprints from and then use it.
The next issue with biometrics is the amount of access that they give as you may see strange withdrawals from your bank account but you only have one set of fingerprint send.
And the final issue and probably the biggest one you see inmost places the police or some other government entity can force you to unlock your device through forcibly putting your finger to the device or forcing you to unlock it with face ID and even if they didn’t force you they could easily unlock it since police. It is impossible for the government to access your device if it is secured with a strong password and many countries have Amendment right aka the right to remain silent which means you also do not have to provide any verbal or written testimony that could incriminate you and this includes giving a password.
Even the countries countries without this right to remain silent it’s still impossible for the government to get into a device without your password in a ideal case.
An article from the Academic journal states that new media and society discusses these concerns specifically involving facial recognition in social media the article discusses Facebook’s tag suggestion tool and how it could potentially be an invasion of privacy to some it may be discomforting and their that social media has the ability to identify important people in our lives based on the photos that we post online others worry that this technology gives he government the ability to missus it for surveillance as use of this technology continues to increase it’s importance.
Today with advanced AI it is quite easy to find a person with just a picture, Yandex images and Google images are best top 2 tools for image search.
Impact on education industry
Biometric technology have major impact on education field biometrics is a technology being implemented schools and colleges all over the world and that is only expected to grow in the future an article by Anne Dunphy called the growth of biometrics in schools supports this growth according to Dunphy from 2014 to 2019 it was predicted that biometric technology will have grown ina compound annual growth rate of 23% considering how much we use this technology in schools.
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