What's driving fingerprinting in cars?
Sunil Thomas · Biometric Technology Today · 2017
For the past five years, car manufacturers have looked to the smartphone to provide a model for developing an increasingly sophisticated user experience, particularly for drivers. Cars have followed the smartphone's lead by, for instance, offering a larger Centre Information Display (CID) screen that delivers higher resolution and fast, responsive capacitive touch sensing. And now vehicle makers are looking to another feature of the smartphone's user interface, the fingerprint sensor, to enhance and modernise the driver's interface to functions, inside and even beyond the car. This – and other forms of biometric authentication – appear to show great promise, if implemented with sensitivity to user privacy and the limitations of the automotive operating environment. However, the use cases of biometric authentication in the car look set to differ, perhaps surprisingly, from those of the smartphone.