The Gym Wants My Fingerprints: A Biometric ID Dilemma
If your gym wants to use your fingerprints as a biometric identifier to save you the trouble of carrying a membership card, is this a good thing? It's a topic of some debate in the Golden State and beyond.
This week at my 24-Hour Fitness club in Silicon Valley, I noticed the installation of fingerprint scanners at the front desk. A day or so later, they began asking patrons who signed in to allow the scanners to record biometric images of their right and left index fingers. It's all part of the giant gym chain's national cardless check-in program, designed to eliminate the need for members to carry gym cards and make it easier for them to validate their identities.
When biometrics get down to the local gym, however, serious questions must be raised. Your biometric identifiers are immutable and, once stored on a computer, impossible to take back. So if the 24-Hour Fitness database gets hacked and some enterprising Black Hat team of computer experts makes off with this sensitive information, many people could forever lose control of this permanent identification marker. Of course, you could scrape off your fingerprints and replace them with new ones. (This is probably possible). But that's getting a little too close to Total Recall for my taste.
