Biometrics Receives Public Acceptance According to Study by Jamison Consulting

Americans appear ready to accept changes in their daily lives to obtain increased levels of security according to Jamison Consulting and BrandMarketing Services.

In the first of a series of research studies designed to assess acceptance of biometrics by the public and IT professionals, it was revealed that more than 80 percent of the public would allow some aspect of their biometric identity to be recorded.

This study, titled the BioMarket Project, found that the majority of people believe government and industry should be encouraged to use biometric techniques to improve security. Most people would also prefer to use biometrics to access banking and brokerage and credit card services instead of using passwords/pin numbers.

The research examined opinions about the use of biometrics including concerns that might inhibit biometric adoption. The greatest concern identified was the perception that biometric information might be misused, with 60 percent of respondents indicating that it is a major concern.

 According to Dr. Larry Chiagouris, Associate Professor at the Lubin School of Business, Pace University, one of the consultants to the BioMarket Project, "People want the government and industry to further the deployment of biometric technologies even though many are not very familiar with these techniques. As the public becomes more familiar with the advantages of biometrics and a variety of concerns are addressed through industry education and vendor communications programs, this broad level of public support has the potential to become almost universal."

Nancy Jamison of Jamison Consulting, another BioMarket Project consultant, noted that a variety of approaches to biometrics are receiving public support. "Of the five biometric technologies that we examined, finger recognition and voice verification had the highest acceptance rates in part due to higher existing levels of public awareness", she stated. S

he further noted that "of greater interest is that other biometric techniques came close to these in acceptance once these techniques were described. This suggests that emerging biometric technologies, such as, hand geometry, iris scanning and facial recognition can compete with more familiar approaches with the proper applications and user education."

The BioMarket Project is a collaboration between BrandMarketing Services, a technology marketing/research company, and Jamison Consulting, a computing and network solutions and speech technology consulting firm. This current study consisted of two phases. The first phase consisted of in-depth interviews with people throughout the United States during the summer of 2002 in order to identify key issues and clarify language to be used in the second phase. The second phase consisted of telephone interviews with a nationally random sample of 200 adults in the United States from September, 2002. The BioMarket project research program will include additional studies of interest to the biometrics industry.