If you work in an office or practically anywhere these days, there is a good chance you need your ID to get into (and often out of) your building.
There is also a very good chance that at some point you’ve forgotten said ID and have had to endure the rigmarole of signing up for a temporary card at reception, or borrowing a colleague’s card every time you have to leave your floor.
Well, JP Morgan has taken things a step further and is insisting staff at its new New York HQ use a fingerprint or eye scan to get into the office. Bizarre as it may sound to some on this side of the Atlantic, it’s all in the name of security, not an unreasonable claim given a recent mass shooting at a building nearby earlier this year.
Using biometric data for work access isn’t completely unknown, of course, especially for sensitive sites such as data centres. Nor is it entirely new: More than 20 years ago, Cantillon used a palm print to clock on for work at a summer job.
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It’s understood that JP Morgan has no plans to make it mandatory for locations beyond its New York base, including Dublin.
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One wonders, though, how long that will hold true if it turns out to be a seamless change that reduces traffic in building lobbies and allows thousands of people to get in and out of work more quickly than with the old ID badge. Saving a couple of minutes doesn’t sound like much, but multiply that by the 10,000 staff expected to use the building, and that will be a significant saving.
You can bet other companies will be watching the initiative closely.
No doubt some people will have privacy or civil liberty concerns about such a change, especially if other firms start rolling it out, whether that’s in Ireland or elsewhere.
Still, the reality is that most of us handed our biometric data in the form of a fingerprint or face ID to the big tech firms long ago, along with reams of personal information.
Given that reality, using biometric data to get in and out of work won’t be that much of a change.
