Biometric Cell Phone Security

[Category: Innovations. If you are new to my blog please read the “About itimes3” page first]

Well this one is for the Sunday night (Sydney time), a bit of a shorter one, its been a busy day walking around the Supa Centre for hours and hours with my girlfriend buying furniture for her new apartment, so I’m kind of tired 😉

But to return to the subject: have you ever wondered if anyone has been messing with your cell phone (mobile) in your absence at any stage in the past? You probably have, if an informal poll amongst my friends is correct (the far majority thought that their phone had been messed with at least at some point in the past).

It could have been a partner checking the phone out of (legit or paranoid) jealousy for messages, numbers or calls of a competitor, or it could have been someone wanting to make a free international call, or any conceivable other reason.

Now laptop computers have had fingerprint readers for some time, at least on a fair number of models from different manufacturers; however what surprises me is that cellphone manufacturers have (as far as I know at least) never included biometric security in their products so far.

I have seen all sorts of password or “image-sequence” protection systems, but they are time consuming to work with so one would expect them to be disabled by the user.

So the reason I am writing this is to suggest to cell phone manufacturers to include one or more biometric security devices in their products.

This could be a fingerprint reader, which would prevent anyone but the legitimate owner access the phone, an iris scanner (which would use the phone’s camera to scan the iris and would unlock upon viewing the owner’s iris), or a different option such as taking a snapshot of the owner which would be checked against a stored image.

I’m really quite surprised that as far as I know none of the cell phone manufacturers have integrated any biometric security until today.

If you like this idea and you work in a type of industry where this is relevant, I would be happy to discuss in more detail, answer questions or assist in other ways. For details and contact information please see the “About itimes3” page.

George Spark

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