Biometric and Identity Theft

Identifying individuals has always been a tricky task. To avoid frauds, industries have been trying to find new ways of identifying individuals. Initially, registers were maintained everywhere, but with everything going digital, they had to find a new way. And unique ids and passwords came in. This password-protected layer was easy to break as half the time people failed to maintain a strong password and half the time these data were leaked. This is when Biometric identification came into use.

Biometric identification

Biometric identification is a way of identifying individuals on the basis of their unique biological traits. These traits can be fingerprints, retina scan, voice recognization, etc. A very common example of biometric identification is smartphones. From passwords, they have shifted to the fingerprint scanner and facial recognization. While this is a safer way of identification, it is way riskier than any other mode of identification.

Risks of using biometric identification

Biometric security companies take images of the biological trait and save them in their database. So, the major risk to this method is of identity theft. Identity theft means stealing the identity traits of people and using them in wrongful ways. The stolen data can be used to plant DNA evidence falsely or to enter into someone’s privacy. Usually, everybody’s fingerprints are saved by government for security purposes. If someone steals these fingerprints, they can easily access the person’s security files and private data.

Though biometric security companies claim that the data is not stored in the form of images, instead they are stored in the form of binary data. And also that their databases are secured with multiple layers of security. But people often forget that hackers are also getting smarter day by day. They not only know how to break into these systems, but they also know how to decrypt this binary data to get the information

Though it is said that the identification mode of cards and passwords can be misplaced, but they can be also be replaced. But once the biometrics gets stolen, it is impossible to replace them. Like, if a person’s credit card gets stolen, they can easily report it to the bank and get a new credit card and solve the problem with no much hassle. But if their fingerprints get stolen, they cannot file in to get new fingerprints. Well, biometric is safer than other modes of identification but is there any solution to the identity theft problem?

The answer is yes, there is. There are certain identity theft protection companies that can help people with this problem and make sure no misuse is done with their biometric data.

Identity theft protection companies

Different identity theft protection companies work in different ways. But each one of them usually follows three steps. Those three steps are:

● Step One: Monitoring

These companies regularly monitor their customer’s credit files. This is important to make sure that no new change is made in their credit without their knowledge.

● Step Two: Alerts

If they find any unknown activity while monitoring the credit files, they inform the person immediately. As these identity thieves are very smart, they don’t let people know about any activity until they succeed in their plans. For example, people do not know that someone accessed their bank accounts until all their money is debited. This is the reason why these identity theft protection companies play an important role in saving people from big frauds.

● Step Three: Recovery

These companies not only help people in identifying these malicious activities, but also helps them in recovering from them. Like they can help in undoing the damage done by the thief and also recover any lost money as they offer insurance policies.

Conclusion:

Biometric identification is a secure way of identifying individuals. But no matter how much trust the biometric security companies shows, they cannot provide a hundred per cent security to people’s data. So, to make sure that the private identification data is not misused by any breacher, one should always take help from identity theft protection companies as they are more aware of any unusual activity that might happen in your credit file than you are. And they can save and recover you from any credit mishappening.