With the rise in hackings and data breaches, companies and government agencies are looking for ways to protect their data that offer more security than passwords. Because passwords are easily lost, stolen, guessed, and cracked by hackers, companies are shifting to the use of biological characteristics that uniquely identify you, called biometric identifiers. For example, financial institutions and online retailers are developing ways to authenticate a purchase by requiring a user to take a selfie and smile, wink, or make another gesture. A stolen password could be easily reused, but faking a user’s arbitrary facial expression is more complicated.

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