Has Pervasive Biometric Security Arrived? - Episode 6 of the Inflection Points Podcast

Many of us have had longer relationships with our banks than we have had with our wives, husbands, partners, kids… and yet, do the bank employees recognize you when you walk their branch building?

Shouldn’t they? They have known you longer, after all.

The bank scenario is just one example that Alexey Khitrov, President of ID R&D, offers up about what can change for the better if we use just a little bit of biometrics, in this episode of Inflection Points. We are not quite at the biometric personal-advertising level as theorized in the science-fiction movie Minority Report. But we’re on the way there.

Alexey wants the world to get to know each other, and as a pioneer in the biometrics field, he’s got an ultra-modern way how we can. When you enter a bank, he wants the bank to know your identity because biometrics can recognize you as soon as you walk in the door. And why wouldn’t we want that personal level of service? It’s a customer-centric world, after all.

He doesn’t stop there. He envisions a world with network-based security that we don’t realize is even there. Right now, we lock our cars, secure our homes, and enter lengthy passwords online, making sure we always include special characters, numbers, and mixed case.

But what if our homes only opened with our biometrics? And we just shut the door because it only opens for us anyway?

Biometric security uses body parts of one kind or another – your face, eyes, fingerprints – to manipulate technology. Security often comes down to something you know, something you have, or in this case, something you are.

After listening to this Inflection Points podcast episode, hosted by Carla Guzzetti and Tim Harrison of the Office of the CTO at Extreme, you’ll understand that sometimes the most simple problems can be the hardest to overcome. For example, how does a computer distinguish between a picture of a face from a real human face?

The answers, as always with biometrics, lie with Alexey. He is a technical entrepreneur filled with big ideas on the future of network-based biometric security technology. We hope you listen for them on Episode 6, Season 2 of Inflection Points: