Robert Bell

Special for CyberTruth

(Editor's note: In this guest post, Robert Bell, CEO of Biometrica, outlines the promise of biometric sensors for stronger privacy. Biometrica is an enterprise and gaming biometrics vendor.)

Privacy has never been such a public issue.

Social medial tools and channels now dominate our communication habits, and new technologies emerge seemingly every day.

Each carries with it the potential for more compromises and less privacy—from cookies to space satellites, we know our daily activities are being tracked and analyzed—yet we change platforms with unprecedented speed and gusto.

The near future might be even more worrisome, with next-generation advances such as wearable technologies and BYOT (or Bring Your Own Token). Facebook friends can affect your credit rating, and every Tweet has numerous metatags that compromise privacy. Yes, technology aids our speech but hurts our privacy.

So maybe it's time to flip the paradigm. Let's make technology work for us on the other side.

What if we could use our most personal characteristics to protect our most personal information?

We can, and it's why the future of biometrics, including the latest generation of biometrics tools, is so exciting. Building on years of tantalizing promise and intriguing capabilities in a slew of science fiction movies, we're entering a new era in which our unique human characteristics—the face, the fingerprints and, perhaps most of all, the eye—can serve as a human shield for the digital age.

The benefits are surely undeniable: According to the National Institute of Standards & Technology, iris-recognition solutions are 100,000 times more resistant to false-positive identification than even facial-recognition alternatives. They're much easier to use than ever before, and the iris can be used to create a key to keep your valuable information safe.

The actual image of the eye used to create this key doesn't need to be stored, leaving nothing to be stolen that can't be replaced. What's more, the key can't be reverse engineered to recover the original image of the eye.

With enough time and money, anything can be hacked. But there are easy-to-use biometric tools available today that make this much more difficult than before. And sometime in the future, perhaps soon, this technology will be in the hands of consumers, empowering them to control their personal information.