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Swallowing Your Password
HughPickens.com writes: Amir Mizroch reports at the WSJ that a PayPal executive who works with engineers and developers to find and test new technologies, says that embeddable, injectable, and ingestible devices are the next wave in identification for mobile payments and other sensitive online interactions. Jonathon Leblanc says that identification of people will shift from "antiquated" external body methods like fingerprints, toward internal body functions like heartbeat and vein recognition, where embedded and ingestible devices will allow "natural body identification." Ingestible devices could be powered by stomach acid, which will run their batteries and could detect glucose levels and other unique internal features can use a person's body as a way to identify them and beam that data out. Leblanc made his remarks during a presentation called Kill all Passwords that he's recently started giving at various tech conferences in the U.S. and Europe, arguing that technology has taken a huge leap forward to "true integration with the human body." But the idea has its skeptics. What could possibly go wrong with a little implanted device that reads your vein patterns or your heart's unique activity or blood glucose levels writes AJ Vicens? "Wouldn't an insurance company love to use that information to decide that you had one too many donuts—so it won't be covering that bypass surgery after all?"
Biometrics are only good so long as the device that reads your pattern is "honest." If you have to inject a device to read your biometric patterns, you could just as easily inject a device that pretends to read your biometrics, but actually copies someone else's.
She just grabs it from the table and slowly creeps up behind me and pushes it gently onto my thumb, and then runs away with an unlocked phone when i notice it...
The value of a password is that it is locked away in MY BRAIN until I choose to use it. These are not passwords, and neither is the button on an iPhone.