CONFIRMED: An Application That Authenticates You By The Shape Of Your Ear

Ergo App Descartes Biometrics, Inc. on Google Play



How unique are your ears? Maybe only Mom
ever noticed them before, but, according to
Michael Boczek, the particular way your ear
touches your phone when you use it is
unique to every person. Boczek's startup,
Descartes Biometrics, has developed an app that lets you sign into your phone not with
a PIN or a swipe pattern, but by touching
your ear to the screen.

"Ergo is the first ear biometric authentication
technology for Android smartphones,"
Boczek tells Popular Science. The app is
supposed to recognize people using a
combination of cues, including the way their
ears and cheeks press the touchscreen and the speed and tilt with which they bring
their phones up. Everything works with
what's already on their smartphones. "One
of the things we're most proud of is there's
no additional hardware required," Boczek
says.

Ergo offers several ways to make its
identifications more accurate, but they
didn't work for me. For example, I tried
putting Ergo in a more lenient setting—one
that would let me into my phone even if my
ear scan wasn't as close of a match as required in a more secure setting—but that
didn't always help. Once, I set Ergo on
minimal security and asked my roommate to
try it. Ergo let her into my phone. Ergo did
lock her out when I raised the security, but
then I couldn't get in. Earlier in the day, Ergo wouldn't let me in on a minimal setting,
either.

I tried scanning my ear several extra times
throughout the day in Ergo's "add extra
scans to your profile" mode, in hopes of
teaching it more about my ear. Sometimes
the app would tell me my scan didn't match
what it already had stored about me. How could it be different? Isn't it still the same
ear?

Like some others working in biometrics,
Boczek talks about one day getting rid of
passwords and PINs and having devices recognize their owners by their biology, whether their fingerprints , their ear prints, or something else. It seems that day is
distant yet. Meanwhile, Ergo is cheap and
fun to try, although I found it generally
more inconvenient than my old swipe
pattern. Maybe you'll have better luck.

It's available for $3.99 for Android devices only.
Get it on Google Play...