Leader: Will biometrics turn us into a nation of hoodies?

Office workers are always being hounded by the IT department to improve their password choices - to stop using the obvious 'password', or easily guessable options such as the name of a significant other, children, cats or dogs.

All of which is sound security advice.

So what happens when your password is your fingerprint?

Increasingly governments and business are looking at biometrics - from fingerprints to irises to gait - as ways of being certain who it is they are doing business with.

Want more on biometrics?

Read silicon.com's A to Z of biometrics to find out more about iris scans, palm prints and ID cards.

Silicon Towers, like most offices, is largely tea-powered which means at the end of the day there are mugs on every desk covered in fingerprints.

But if your fingerprint becomes the quotidian way you log onto the corporate network - as some experts think will be the case - then is this the biometric equivalent of writing your password on a Post-it note and sticking it to your monitor?

Biometric security could be a tremendous benefit but at the same time it will spawn a new generation of identity thieves who will want to use our biometric information to break into our bank accounts and identity cards and whatever else is secured with these biometric 'passwords'.

This means that it could become more important to protect the information that we either leave behind (fingerprints on a mug) or allow to be captured (faces on CCTV) on a daily basis.

Of course, many biometric systems will be linked to a token (such as a smart card) to cut down on identity theft but the fundamental point remains - discarded biometrics will have a value to thieves and will need to be protected.

Will the increased use of biometric security turn us into a nation of paranoids who will wear gloves to prevent leaving fingerprints, sunglasses to stop our irises being scanned, hoods to prevent thieves from getting enough data to spoof facial recognition systems, and baggy clothes to disguise the way we walk?

There is of course a name for people that already dress in this way.

And it would be a truly strange bi-product if a technology designed to improve security actually turned us into a nation of hoodies.