Your Heartbeat Can Give Away Your Identity, Like a Fingerprint

Our heartbeats differ just enough to tell us apart, but they also give away potentially sensitive information

Nathaniel Scharping
OneZero

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Photo: Westend61/Getty Images

Heartbeats, like our fingerprints and faces, are unique. The distinctive waveforms generated by a heart’s expansions and contractions differ just enough from person to person that they can be used to tell us apart. That means heartbeats could serve as a biometric — a unique physiological characteristic that can be used to identify a person. Some scientists think a heartbeat could be a better identifier than the fingerprints we use to unlock phones today.

Startups today make unobtrusive heart monitors that can detect drowsiness behind the wheel of a car or offer perpetual user authentication in high-security manufacturing facilities. These monitors could eventually replace fingerprint scanners on smartphones, or the key fobs we use to enter office buildings.

“As a security researcher, absolutely, I would pick ECG over fingerprint scanners or basically anything else that we use at the moment,” Simon Eberz, a research associate with the University of Oxford’s department of computer science, tells OneZero.

But authentication via heartbeat comes with its own unique privacy concerns, not…

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