The Biometric Daemon: A Public Perspective

Information privacy is maintained through authentication—the act of proving to a system that you are who you say you are. Unfortunately, current authentication methods are affected by a range of usability problems that impact significantly on the security of people’s data and access to secure systems. Recently, an experience-oriented security device, the Biometric Daemon, has been proposed which allows users to authenticate without the need to remember secrets. The Daemon aims to provide easy, natural, and continuous authentication in order to promote more secure practices, but the concept has not, until now, been subjected to critical user evaluation. This paper describes a series of focus groups conducted with the aim of eliciting attitudes and privacy concerns towards the concept of the Biometric Daemon.