I'm backing the views of Greg Stefancik from Facebook over David Nahamoo from IBM. Nahamoo's bold prediction of ubiquitous biometrics by 2015 was actually made back in 2011, and was clearly wrong even then: http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2011/12/ibm-5-in-5-biometric-data-will-be-key.html?showComment=1325313603569#c5795950476348994192.

The idea that biometrics will replace passwords can be debunked by simply looking at today's preeminent consumer fingerprint scanner: the very nicely designed Apple iTouch. The use of a passcode is CORE to this biometric device! My experience is typical: about 1 in 10 or 20 attempts to log on by finger fails, and you have to revert to a four digital password. I use the backup passcode every single day. And when you activate an iPhone 5S from power off, you must use the passcode.

There are some days that my iTouch just won't read my finger at all (it seems to play up when I've used a different hand soap at home). So take a minute folks and think about this. It doesn't matter what biometric you might use now or in the distant future: face or finger or voice or gait or ear or electrocardiogram or your "DNA"; the reality is that your biological presentation differs from day to day. You might have a frog in your throat, or you might have cut your hand, or the camera might be dirty, or the lighting might be really low. So now and then the biometric is just not going to work for significant stretches of time. What would you want the system to do then eh?

I tell you - passwords will be an inevitable adjunct to biometrics forever. But these little real life kinks are rarely given much attention when people talk about biometrics. People talk as if this technology is perfect, despite decades of experience that nothing is perfect, and should never be assumed to be perfect. IMBer David Nahamoo's 2011 suggestion of staring into a camera to get money was pure fantasy. Biometrics are NOT "unique": people do in fact occasionally share the same effective biometric template, because they are fuzzy. So a cardless biometric ATM is fanciful: such a system would sometimes randomly give you access to some other person's money!! And the worst shortcoming of all in biometrics concerns theft and revocation: there is no practical way to cancel and reissue a compromised biometric.

Biometrics do have their place, but it's actually a pretty small place, defined by serious limitations that really should be talked about more and better understood by lay people and reporters.