How Secure Is Microsoft's Fingerprint Reader?

Moos3d asks: "I recently found out about this Microsoft Fingerprint Reader at the library and ever since then I have been fascinated by using something like this for my own PC. How secure is this compared to using multiple 10+ character long passwords? Some people I've talked to seem to think it isn't safe at all and some people seem to think it is only safe for casual use. I only plan to use it for online forums and other applications that don't require great measures of security so it seems to be perfect for me, but how secure do you think it really is?"

Comments

A place where it works

[samael]

The hospital my father works in uses these to control access to data entry in the neonatal ward. The nurses would otherwise be typing in passwords about 300 times a day, as the computers lock whenever someone isn't standing at them. It means that the tracking data for who entered what data is always correct and that time isn't taken up typing in passwords all the time.

I'm not sure how easy they are to fool, but in the hospital, where people wouldn't be at the terminals unless they were a recognised user anyway, they're perfect.