[Penforhire]

We use passwords for DRM now. All I'm suggesting is a biometric alternate, with your original passwords as a fall-back capability.

Whatever you can do to yourself with passwords you can do with the scanner. If your hands shake that much then just enter your password instead, which must be tough if you shake that much anyway. I'm pretty messy at my desk and the top of my print scanner is, fortunately, sealed, lol. The software can, today, accept all 10 fingertips as alternate entries (in case of injury).

In the case of your 12 year old daughter, assuming her prints changed enough to make the scanner reject her all she'd have to do is go back to an original passord and re-enter her current fingerprints. Same for adding you as a second or third user's prints. Same if you somehow delete your fingerprints. Easy peasy. Keep in mind that we are talking about an alternate identity verication system.

The more paranoid companies require a personal USB token to be connected in addition to the password/finger scan.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much. I'll grant you the question of how often to require a password or print scan entry. The biometric technique is so easy that doing it several times a day (if I walk away from my work PC) is painless. If you're some sort of shaky-fingered fringe case then, yes, entering a password would be obnoxious, though plenty of smartphone users have their devices require a password every time they turn on the screen.

It would be tied to a device (edit - though with the "cloud" your print file could be automatically copied to your devices), while your password makes your Amazon (for example) acount transportable. If you buy a new Kindle you have to enter your password anyway, no?

I do expect retinal or face-recognition scanners to take the place of fingerprints as camera tech gets ever cheaper. Or else a whole-finger scanner, rather than a stripe-style, which would help those with shaky fingers.