Biometrics acceptance in Arab culture: An exploratory study

Abstract

Biometrics development evidences potential to satisfy the user identifying and authentication requirements. However, it is the user judgment which will impact the behaviour to accept or reject this kind of solutions. There has been extensive research conducted to investigate the technical issues of biometrics systems such as accuracy performance, algorithms and system architecture, and just a few focused on user acceptance. This paper is part of a series that study users' behaviour towards acceptance of biometrics as authentication tool. It also aims to present a view of some problems that users face with passwords and how they manage them, in a particular social environment, the Arab culture (more precisely, at Yemen). The findings show that due to using non-secure methods to recall passwords, most Yemenis (who are familiar with ATM and internet) do not suffer from forgetting passwords. However they prefer using biometrics as they perceived both ease of use and usefulness.