Religion takes a stab at bringing down biometrics.

The religious conflict of interest will never go away. It's always going to be an issue when biometrics butts heads with people who are sure Big Brother and 'The Mark of the Beast' are things that need to be habitually avoided, and reside within the technology.

Like this one man, who lost his job because he refused to give his fingerprint for the new time & attendance system. Often the basis of such arguments lies in attributes of the technology that they believe to be true, however false it may be. But even when presented with the real facts, it doesn't do much to sway people who want to grasp at anything to continue holding onto their beliefs. If they dislike the technology so much, that in itself should be the reason why you refuse to use it. Not everyone likes computers, or cell phones - this is just one more technology that doesn't have to agree with everyone. Yes only the data is stored for use, not the fingerprint itself. But tell that to someone who believes it could be used to find out other things, and sometimes it just doesn't do any good.

Employers as it is have so much information on their employees that using a fingerprint to "find out how many seconds staff spend on the toilet" seems trivial. Right now they can look up credit reports, and past addresses, criminal history... They don't need a fingerprint for that.

Man sacked for refusing to give employer his fingerprints.

Update: Right up the alley of this post is an opinion article just published on eWeek's site. Keep Real Privacy Risks in Focus.

In the meantime, I don't want to yield the floor to the forces of hysteria. In an essay published in the Detroit News last year, Clyde Wayne Crews, director of technology studies at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said, "Data-mining and biometrics, at least in principle, are about enhancing convenience, service, authentication and individual security more than they are about invading privacy." That's exactly right.

Let's keep real privacy risks in focus and merely apparent risks in the background, where they belong.

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