MasterCard joining push for fingerprint ID standard
Found on USA Today on Saturday, 05 October 2013
MasterCard is joining the FIDO Alliance, signaling that the payment network is getting interested in using fingerprints and other biometric data to identify people for online payments.
The Alliance is developing an open industry standard for biometric data such as fingerprints to be used for identification online. The goal is to replace clunky passwords and take friction out of logging on and purchasing using mobile devices.
That has nothing to do with passwords, but tracking. Right now you can use different usernames and passwords at different services, but if all that is replaced by your fingerprint data, then you can be easily identified across all services. Even worse, if the fingerprint authentication gets compromised, all services are acessible and updating the password just won't work like that anymore. All that after administrators have spent so much effort to teach users not to reuse the same password over and over again.