At the beginning of the month I happened to blog about Prof. John Daugman and the misgivings he expressed about fingerprint biometrics. I now have some practical experience of this which I'm happy to share for the greater good...
My new laptop has a fingerprint scanner which you can use to authenticate when you boot the machine. In a spirit of altruistic enquiry, I thought I should try it out. However, I was also mindful of Caspar Bowden's very thoughtful recent comments about 'reserving a few biometrics for later', so I only registered a couple of fingers, rather than the whole fistful. In late July/early August it all worked fine.
On holiday, among other things, I did some kayaking and rock climbing. One consequence of this was that the skin on bits of my hands was not in very good nick when I got home, and guess what, the fingerprint scanner didn't believe it was me. OK, there was a backup password, but as luck would have it (and how often does this happen when one goes on holiday) I had a mental blank as to what I had set it to. The most obvious password didn't work, and in thinking back through its predecessors I accidentally missed the correct one, so I had a rather sticky few hours contemplating the awkward conversation with my boss on Monday morning:
"Um, I've still got my new laptop, and it's all working just fine, but.. er.. I can't actually use it. I should be able to again when my fingerprints grow back."
Hmm.
Anyway, I hope this is of some use to anyone wondering whether to start using fingerprint biometrics.
1 - look carefully at what the fallback options are if some or all of your fingerprints stop working;
2 - bear in mind that if one option is a backup password, you might only ever need to use that infrequently - so consider what you might do to ensure that you remember it correctly over an extended period of time. (As an aside, I have a password for a telephone banking service which I never use. I am only ever asked for the password in a real, exeptional emergency, such as when I'm calling in to report a lost or stolen card. As a result, I can never remember what the password is, which rather defeats the point...)
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