By Jo Best, 15 September 2008 16:33
NEWS
Sales of computers with built-in fingerprint readers are skyrocketing.
According to Comet, PCs and laptops with fingerprint scanners made up around seven per cent of all May-to-July computer sales - a jump of 91 per cent on the preceding three months.
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According to Comet, the rise in sales of PCs with biometrics scanners comes as a result of Britons seeking better security while becoming increasingly fed up with remembering numerous passwords.
According to research by the retailer, 82 per cent of the 1,300 Comet customers surveyed had had enough of passwords and want a better way to log into their machines.
Meanwhile, password security remains lax, with 30 per cent of those surveyed saying they share their passwords with workmates, friends or family and 11 per cent claiming to enter the word 'password' to get access to their computer.
Comments
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1. Authentication Streamlined
The amazing thing is that the laptop manufacturers are including fingerprint-driven password management as almost an afterthought. What makes the fingerprint scanner have real value is when you add a platform like BIO-key's WEB-key authentication, which lets web sites directly authenticate a user with that built in fingerprint scanner, with no password and username in the mix at all. This makes every site able to leverage the highest level of strong authentication, while actually making end-users' lives easier, since all they do is swipe their finger to log in, from any machine, not just their own.
2. Phil Rae
"According to Comet, the rise in sales of PCs with biometrics scanners comes as a result of Britons seeking better security"
Is it not just because PCs happen to include fingerprint scanners these days? I personally have a fingerprint scanner on my laptop (an HP), and while it worked well, the software required made my laptop sloooooowww... so I inevitable had to un-install it.
I'm afraid that if biometrics is truly going to take off (which I hope it does), the software will have to come up to scratch.