Biometric identification is one of those technologies that highlights the importance of convenience as a key factor in technology adoption. You might not have flown for some time, due to Covid restrictions, but when you return to air travel you will realize how far many airports and airlines have advanced their systems to facilitate, for the moment on a voluntary basis, the use of facial recognition technologies to speed up security or boarding.
In April, US company Clearview was given the green light for its facial recognition technology patent, despite the controversy over its unrestricted use of web scraping techniques to obtain faces to train its algorithms on (if a web search returns your face, chances are you’re on a Clearview database). At the same time, airports and sports stadiums are starting to normalize the practice. Now that we use biometrics to unlock many of our devices, it is getting difficult to avoid sidelining the legitimately worrying concerns raised years ago by privacy advocates to try to prohibit or control the use of this type of technology.
Even though companies such as IBM and Facebook have abandoned some of their biometrics research, while efforts to use it to recognize drivers in vehicles have largely failed and the police have found low accuracy rates, the use of this technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous.
The fundamental reason? One all-important element when it comes to forecasting the adoption of a technology: convenience. It would seem that we are able to override all sorts of concerns when that variable comes into play. Even well-informed people legitimately concerned about the widespread use of biometrics are perfectly happy to be photographed and the image stored in a database about which they know nothing… if it means getting through airport security more quickly.
Sure, airports can be a bit of a hassle, but it’s one we’ve learned to live with over the years. Holding your passport and boarding pass or smartphone with one hand while you take care of your luggage with the other to enter the plane, or waiting while an official stamps your passport when you enter a country means waiting in line for a few minutes. But now, given the chance to skip those few minutes, we’re suddenly embracing biometric systems, especially for airports we use frequently. Objectively, the time we save is minimal, but the sense of privilege and convenience overcomes any privacy concerns.
The simple truth is that if a new technology can save a few steps, eliminate friction in a procedure or serve in some way as a privilege over other people, it’s likely to be adopted quickly, regardless of legitimate concerns about its use. In the same way that we like it when a waiter knows us in a restaurant or bar, the idea of bypassing tedious procedures thanks to a system knowing our face becomes attractive, and leads us to minimize the possible consequences for society of such technologies or the loss of privacy that they may entail.
When we standardize a technology for a given use, as Apple did with its Face ID, and millions of people around the world start using their face to unlock their devices, it matters little that the brand has done so because it considers it a more secure system than a fingerprint or that it has a well-earned reputation for responsibly managing the privacy of its users: the adoption spiral is underway, users have proven that the technology works and is enormously convenient, and it is going to be very difficult to stop its adoption.
If you want to succeed in technology, you can offer many things, but one of the most relevant value propositions is convenience.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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