I Feel Like I’m Taking Selfies All Day! Towards Understanding Biometric Authentication on Smartphones

We present the results of an MTurk survey (n = 383) on the reasons for using and not using biometric authentication sys-tems on smartphones. We focused on Apple’s Touch ID as well as Android’s Face Unlock as they are the most prevalent systems on the market. For both systems, we categorized the participants as a) current users, b) former users that deacti-vated it at some point and c) nonusers. The results show that usability is one of the main factors that influences the decision on whether or not to use biometric verification on the smart-phone. To our surprise and as opposed to previous research on biometric authentication, privacy and trust issues were not among the most important decision factors