Actual work where 2 students given their post on this:Many people believe that the use of biometrics is an invasion of privacy. For example, an eye scanning device records the inner structure of a per
Biometrics and Data Privacy
The biometric technology can be a threat to individual privacy or be developed for protecting individual data depending on their design and deployment. There exist serious privacy concerns when it comes to the use of biometrics. When using biometrics, data is often collected, and potential hackers may hack such data. For instance, high profile data may attractive target for hackers; however, such data tend to be highly secured. As biometrics become prevalent in various areas, users’ information is likely to be in more areas, which may employ the same level of security.
Biometric features are often associated with individuals; hence, if such information leaks, this will be a violation of users’ privacy, which in turn results in severe and continued problems, since the information from an individual cannot be replaced (Natgunanathan et al., 2016). Furthermore, data stored in a biometric database may be more vulnerable than any other data. This is because, in databases of human traits such as fingerprints and iris scan, passwords cannot change their passwords, and if biometric data is compromised, one cannot be able to control it.
Today, new and emerging technologies make it possible to extract more individual information from biometrics being collected. Most law enforcement agencies have databases that only contain fragments of the genome; however, they can only choose to keep the physical DNA samples permanently. This raises concerns on how the future genetic analysis tools will be capable of discerning. As more organizations use biometric authentication, there is also concern regarding how biometric data is secured, as there is no restriction on what biometric information organizations need to share and with whom (Memon, 2017). In essence, there is a need to develop mechanisms that give users some form of control over how their biometric data is used. Therefore, there is a need to understand privacy threats to users’ personal information as well as ways to alleviate such threats.
References
Memon, N. (2017). How biometric authentication poses new challenges to our security and privacy [in the spotlight]. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 34(4), 196-194.
Natgunanathan, I., Mehmood, A., Xiang, Y., Beliakov, G., & Yearwood, J. (2016). Protection of privacy in biometric data. IEEE Access, 4, 880-892.
