Security v Convenience – the Debate Hots Up

A recent technical primer on CXO Bytes ¹, which makes a strong case for the seemingly inevitable growth of biometrics into all aspects of digital identity, marks a good point to reflect on the ongoing debate between ‘security versus convenience’.

The CXO article takes as its starting point the advent of the internet and technological advancements which overturned the old practices of KYC (Know Your Customer) that were used to authenticate the identity of a person.

The manual verification processes using visual and record cross referencing, the article argues, required a lot of time and resources from people and organisations. As the number of events where citizens and consumers have their identity authenticated to access services, make financial transactions and cross borders has increased, so has the strain on resources – leading to processing bottlenecks and inconvenience on the part of the user.