MAGAZINE   December Magazine Contents Web Links Past Issues Try a Free Issue Customer Service Feedback GETTING STARTED   STOCKS Build a Strong Stock Portfolio Four Questions to Ask Before You Buy How to Make Sense of the Earnings Report   FUNDS Growing a Fund Portfolio Pick Funds the Right Way Time to Ditch Your Fund?   BONDS Add Balance with Bonds Bonds Made Easy MORE... TOOLS   STOCKS Kiplinger's Stock Finder Test your risk tolerance Pick the Best 'Bankerage' Company   FUNDS Kiplinger's Mutual Fund Finder Which fund is better? How do growth and income funds compare?   BONDS Which bond is better? What is my bond's yield to maturity? What price should I pay for a bond?

INTERVIEW
Face of the Future
by Melynda Dovel Wilcox

Dr. Joseph Atick is chief executive officer of Identix (IDNX), a leading biometrics security company.

What exactly is biometrics? Each person not only has a unique fingerprint but also a unique pattern and texture to the skin, facial geometry and the iris of the eye. Identix specializes in using fingerprint, facial and skin biometrics for large-scale identification systems.

Such as? The State Department just awarded us a contract for the largest facial-recognition system in the world. When foreigners apply for a visa, their photographs will be checked against a database of 70 million images to screen for duplicates, aliases and faces on a watch list. A similar system is used for issuing driver's licenses in Colorado and for voter registration in Mexico.

Is facial recognition as accurate as fingerprints? No. You can identify someone with a very high level of confidence 95% of the time, compared with 99.9% of the time with fingerprints. But there are about 1.3 billion photographs of known people in official databases, versus several hundred million sets of fingerprints on file.

Is biometrics being used for purposes other than law enforcement? About 80% of the industry's revenue currently comes from government security applications. But we're seeing a small yet growing interest from industries such as health care, financial services and transportation, which want to improve the security of their databases. Within the next decade, biometrics will reach the consumer in the form of a more secure way to pay on eBay, for example. And biometrics is being incorporated into some cell phones so only the owner can get access.

Has 9/11 affected the adoption of biometrics? There's been a clear acceleration since then. We want to remain an open society, and the compromise is to manage identities so that trustworthy individuals get full access and risky ones do not.