There is a myth that fingerprint scanners invade the privacy of
employees by storing biometric information that could be open to misuse.
Mitrefinch Australia has installed their biometric time and attendance
solutions at several organisations across Australia and NZ, and is often faced
with this argument.
Mitrefinch’s biometric scanners don't actually collect and store
fingerprints. When an employee uses the fingerprint reader, the system saves a
mathematical representation of the fingerprint and reproduces it as a template,
which is checked against the data stored by the reader for a possible match. The
employee’s registration is accepted only when there is a match.
It’s not possible to reconstruct a person’s fingerprint from the
template.