Biometric Adoption Finally Ready to Accelerate?

By Larry Dawson, Accu-Time Systems

Catch up on Part 1

For decades, the collection of fingerprint data has been associated with crime investigation and law enforcement. Criminals are routinely fingerprinted and their fingerprints are entered into national databases. Crime scenes are “dusted” for trace fingerprints. People go to prison because their fingerprint has matched that found at a crime scene. Fingerprints stored in law enforcement databases are linked with other personal data, like social security numbers, addresses, etc. It is no wonder that the average employee perceives the collection of their fingerprint information as problematic.

Those of us with knowledge about the use of biometrics in workforce management continually wrestle with the public’s mis-perception of fingerprint usage. As industry professionals, we know that we’re not actually storing an image of someone’s fingerprint, as do law enforcement agencies. Instead, biometric time and attendance devices select minutiae points along the whorls, loops and arches and convert those points into an algorithmic template. That template cannot be reverse-engineered into an actual fingerprint image. This is a difficult concept for typical users to grasp. Hence, employees’ ongoing resistance to biometric devices in the workplace.

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