Should businesses have access to the faces and fingerprints of workers and be able to monitor employees?: The Benefits and Costs of the Biometric Recognition Technology Industry

With the global biometric technology market size being USD 51.55 billion in 2022 and projected to be USD 137.5 billion in 2030, businesses have begun to implement this technology into their companies. However, despite its security and productivity benefits, the rise of biometric technology poses the question of whether the costs and ethical concerns are outweighed.  

Biometric recognition technology is the automated recognition of individuals based on their physical and behavioral traits. This technology has helped companies enhance their password-free authentication solutions with facial recognition, fingerprint verification, voice recognition, and more. 

Currently, the extent to which biometric technology can improve efficiency, automation, and touchless consumer solutions have made this system very attractive to businesses. According to a poll, people spend an average of 10.9 hours per year entering and/or resetting passwords, resulting in a productivity and labor loss of $5.2 million annually per company. However, with a 99% accuracy rate and instantaneous matching, biometric technology mitigates this issue as this system can replace previous employee logins of typing IDs and passwords for time logs. Additionally, this system has saved a company 6.25 million dollars, as 56% of the studied companies saw a reduction in the volume of calls to their call center after deploying biometrics. Furthermore, as employers can monitor employee performance and activity with ease, rule enforcement has been streamlined and stronger, creating a more productive and professional environment. Not only that, but with the contact-free solutions that this system provides, businesses gain a competitive edge as they are investing into systems that allow for convenience and mitigate the spreading of infectious diseases. Biometric technology also eliminates unauthorized access to buildings thus increasing security and removes the costs associated with lost access cards or forgotten passwords.

However, despite being known for its strong protection of highly-sensitive information, it is also known for how it makes this information extremely vulnerable, especially internationally. When information regarding unique biological traits that cannot be easily changed is easily available, safety threats such as identity fraud are heightened and even further stressed when considering how this technology actually exposed 5.6 million fingerprints of federal employees to hostile foreign nations. Not even that, but privacy concerns must also be addressed. In fact, a letter from International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation, an American multinational technology corporation, issued to US lawmakers, stated that the computing giant would no longer offer facial recognition services and condemned its use “for mass surveillance,... [or] violations of basic human rights and freedoms.” The continuous use of this technology and increasing dependence on it raises questions concerning the ethics, safety, and privacy of it, and whether or not society should continue to integrate it into everyday life.