Biometrics : Attitudes and factors influencing a breakthrough in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Biometrics is a collection of methods for identifying and authorizing individuals with something they are, or do. It is considered to be one of the most secure technologies for security, both physical and logical. Security is something very important for organizations today, but yet there has been a low interest in investing in biometrics for security in Sweden. The purpose of this thesis has been to establish factors to why biometrics has not been implementedto any large extent, even though the technology has been around for long. We have evaluated the attitudes and views of individuals, as well as company leaders. Problem and questions with biometrics that often are discussed are privacy concerns, costs and ROI (return on investment) and user acceptance. Foremost there is a concern about the costs of implementing such a solution, although some claim that money can be saved by avoiding the costs in more traditional security methods, such as password administration and in security cards. There is a range of different technologies to use, such as facial-scan, voice-scan and the most mature and well known technique, finger-scan which has been around for a long time, especially for identifying criminals. All these techniques have there positive and negative sides, often measured in different levels of universality, uniqueness, permanence and collectability, e.g. eye-scan has a high uniqueness, facial-scan has a high universability and signature-scan has a low permanence level. We have collected our data through interviews with companies and suppliers of biometric systems as well as a questionnaire given to private persons. By interpreting the data in a qualitative way we have made our analysis and reached a conclusion. Our result shows that a cost related to biometric solutions is the largest reason why investments have been absent. This verifies the results of other authors, that the cost is the largest obstacle. Another important factor is that companies believe that biometrics is for organizations with a very high security need. Further our result show that individuals are positive towards biometrics.