Biometrics involve the use of fingerprint, iris, voice or facial patterns to identify oneself. It is more secure than a PIN or a password.
Apple has not so much invented technologies as brought them into the mainstream. Think multitouch user interface and Touch ID, the latter of which popularised unlocking phones with your finger. Now with the iPhone X, Apple is using your face as a passcode.
While Face ID is not the same as an iris scanner, which other companies have installed on their devices before, Apple — and its competitors like Samsung, Google and OnePlus — could lead the way in changing how people interact with their phones in the future, particularly in India.
Biometrics involve the use of fingerprint, iris, voice or facial patterns to identify oneself. It is more secure than a PIN or a password. A 2017 HSBC survey of over 12,000 persons in 11 countries, including India, found that nearly half the respondents expect fingerprint recognition to replace passwords and a quarter of them say iris recognition will be the alternative.
The study also concluded that China and India will be the most open to new technologies. Nearly a third of the Indians surveyed use fingerprint scanners, next only to China (40%), and Indians are three times as likely to have used iris recognition as the average of the 11 countries.
Offices are increasingly using fingerprint and iris scanners to allow access to their employees and millions are receiving government subsidies under various schemes through Aadhaar, a biometrics-based identification initiative.
However, concerns over the misuse of the data collected for Aadhaar remain. Mobile apps are fast replacing passwords with fingerprint identification. E-payment companies like Paytm and banks use biometric data to authenticate payments and transfers. Facial or iris recognition on phones is glitchy and not foolproof - what fingerprint scanning was three years ago - but it is only a matter of time before it becomes reliable and available on a wide array of devices.
Phones will soon have fingerprint readers on the screen itself. TechSci Research pegged the size of the biometrics market in India in 2016 at around $780 million, which is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26% till 2022, making it clear that the adoption of biometrics is heading only one way.
