PayPal Study finds Consumers Okay With Biometrics

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/paypal-study-finds-consumers-okay-with-biometrics/2013/10/09/54eb5132-3095-11e3-9ccc-2252bdb14df5_story.html?hpid=z12

2. Category of Level: Technology/Privacy

3. Level of Issue: National

4. This article concerns individuals everywhere who use a smart phone. There is no policy in place for this yet the new iPhone offers fingerprint instead of password settings, but it is an opt-in choice.

5. This issue affects individuals because it starts to question some of the privacy rights we are allowed. If we can scan our finger print on our cell phone, there is no telling the amount of information the government could get from that alone. This will start to cause issues rising even more about privacy since recently the government has been collecting data off of individual cell phones.

6. My views on this are very favored towards allowing the finger print privacy setting. The title of this article originally caught my eye because earlier in the semester one of the questions on our weekly quizzes was dealing with this and I have written another blog response on different privacy issues. This article seemed to be the other way around though. The PayPal studies found that more Americans then not actually prefer the finger print safety feature and are okay with it. This is more based on a safety issue for everyday use more so then privacy from the government though. The field of people who participated in this study however did not actually use the feature themselves they just were okay with the idea. I found this very interesting for many reasons. I believe that your cell phone is yours and you have the right to do as you please with it. I also am a huge believer that cell phones get stolen everyday, hacked into, and used for other purposes. This is a huge reason why I completely think if something gets out that you don't want to it is your own fault. Your phone is yours to do what you want at your own disposal. If you don't want someone else to get a hold of or see something on your phone then you probably shouldn't be putting it on there anyways. I realize that there are certain things in technology that make it easier for us to do day to day transactions through our phone, and don't get me wrong I use them. For example the online banking is something I frequently use. With that being said, I also don't do huge transactions or have the capability to do very drastic things through this account. If I had an account where I was making substantial transactions I probably wouldn't have that hooked up to my phone knowing that if my phone ever got stolen someone else would have access to this account. This was the only concern from the people in this study. They weren't sure how privacy issues related back to this or how they could be addressed. More people then not these days don't even have a password setting set up on there phone, myself included. I think that it is good that people are okay with the fingerprint feature, it would be a better way at protecting yourself from everyday issues and having better privacy settings, however, be careful for issues that arise when the government starts to use this towards their benefit.