The WSJ Sounds the Alarm on Biometrics. It’s Ringing in the Wrong Room.

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Cheryl Winokur Munk’s March 20th piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Biometrics Sounds Cool—and Safe. Maybe, but Read This First,” is the kind of article that reads as responsible consumer journalism and lands as something more consequential: a well-intentioned warning aimed squarely at the wrong target.

The privacy concerns it raises are real. The framework it uses to evaluate them is not. And for the fraud and identity industry, the consequences of that framework taking hold—in boardrooms, in legislatures, and in the public mind—are serious enough to warrant a direct, informed response.

Ralph Rodriguez, President and Chief Product Officer at Daon, delivered exactly that response in a March 27th LinkedIn piece titled “Biometrics Aren’t the Risk. Weak Implementations Are.” Daon is not a peripheral voice in this conversation. The company has spent more than two decades building identity assurance infrastructure that now secures hundreds of millions of transactions daily across financial services, government, healthcare, and travel—processing biometric verifications for some of the most risk-averse, heavily regulated institutions in the world.

Rodriguez speaks from that operational depth, and it shows. His rebuttal is technically precise, practically grounded, and far more useful to anyone trying to understand where the actual danger lies than the alarm the Journal sounded.

This commentary takes his side—not because Daon has a commercial stake in biometrics’ reputation, but because the evidence supports his argument and the WSJ’s framing actively misleads the people most in need of accurate information.

What the WSJ Actually Argues

To be fair to Munk’s piece, it doesn’t claim biometrics are useless. It presents five consumer “considerations” before handing over biometric data to companies:

1. You can’t replace stolen biometrics the way you can a credit card.
2. Companies have wide latitude to retain and sell your data
3. Data breaches happen, and you may never know about them.
4. Some biometric modalities are safer than others.
5. Deletion requests are possible but inconvenient.

These are not entirely unreasonable points in isolation. The problem is the framing that binds them. The article treats biometric data as intrinsically and uniquely dangerous—distinct from other personal data primarily because of its permanence. The opening hook, delivered by researcher Ashkan Soltani, sets the tone: you’re stuck with your facial geometry and your fingerprint “for life unless you take drastic measures like burning your fingerprints off.” If hackers gain access to your stored biometric data, the article concludes flatly, “you have no recourse.”

That conclusion is precisely where Rodriguez draws the line.

The Foundational Mistake: Biometrics Are Not Passwords

The WSJ’s entire risk argument rests on an implicit analogy: biometrics are like passwords, except permanent.

Rodriguez’s first and most important correction is conceptual, reframing everything that follows. Biometrics were never designed to function like passwords. A face or a fingerprint is not a secret in the way a password is. It is a human characteristic, visible to anyone who looks at you and present on every surface you touch.

Serious biometric systems, Rodriguez explains, are not built on the fantasy that your biometric trait is private by itself. They are built on a protected biometric reference, a controlled capture process, and a broader trust decision that incorporates device possession, channel integrity, risk signals, location metadata, and policy controls.

What this means in practice is that the operational object in a well-implemented system is not your face. It is a derived mathematical template—a non-reversible transformation of biometric features—stored with cryptographic protections, subject to strict retention limits, and in better architectures, revocable and replaceable without any change to your biology. Rodriguez is clear on this point: “the stored reference—not the body itself—is the credential under administrative control.”

A compromised template in a properly architected system can be diversified, revoked, and re-enrolled. The WSJ says there’s no recourse. Daon and companies like it have built that recourse directly into their platforms.

The Journal describes biometric systems as though they universally store a reusable copy of your face in a database, sitting there like an unexpired credit card number. Some deployments do work that way. Those deployments deserve the criticism the article delivers. But that is an implementation failure, not a technology failure, and collapsing the two is where the WSJ goes most seriously wrong.

The Missing Counterfactual

Every risk argument requires a comparison. The WSJ’s piece never honestly supplies one. It raises the specter of biometric data being stolen and used for identity theft, without once asking what authentication alternative it implicitly recommends instead.

The answer, the article describes, is virtually every consumer payment and authentication context: passwords, PINs, and credit card numbers. The very credentials it implicitly holds up as recoverable and therefore safer.

This is where the analysis collapses. Passwords are the dominant mechanism through which identity fraud is committed at scale, every day, across every sector. They are phished, credential-stuffed, brute-forced, and sold in bulk on dark web markets. The 2015 Office of Personnel Management breach—which Munk cites as evidence of biometric risk—exposed 21 million records, including Social Security numbers, addresses, financial histories, and 5.6 million fingerprints. The fingerprints have not, in the decade since, been weaponized at any documented scale comparable to that of the accompanying personal and credential data.

The article quotes Jodi Daniels of Red Clover Advisors, who advises consumers to consider the worst-case scenario:

• For biometrics, inside a platform like Daon’s TrustX—a SaaS-based identity continuity system that integrates liveness detection, protected references, and hardened capture controls across the full identity lifecycle—a compromised template cannot be replayed into the system.
• For passwords, every account the user has ever created is compromised simultaneously, because most consumers reuse credentials across platforms.

That asymmetry deserves at least a sentence in a piece nominally advising consumers on authentication risk. It gets none.

The Threats the WSJ Doesn’t Mention

Rodriguez raises two threat vectors entirely absent from the Journal’s piece, and their absence matters enormously for anyone trying to understand where biometric fraud actually lives.

The first is the presentation attack, which is the most prevalent real-world attack on biometric systems. Attackers use printed photos, replayed videos, 3D-printed masks, and AI-generated synthetic media to convince a biometric sensor that a live person is present when one isn’t. This is the threat that modern liveness detection and Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) technology is specifically built to defeat. The question a Daon-class system asks isn’t just “have I seen this face before?” It’s “was this face captured from a live human, present right now, at this specific moment of acquisition?” That distinction is the entire difference between a system that can be spoofed with a photograph and one that cannot. The WSJ’s storage-centric framing makes this category of defense invisible to its readers.

The second is the injection attack, which is the more sophisticated current frontier, where an attacker bypasses the camera entirely and inserts falsified media directly into the software pipeline. A virtual camera feed, a forged video stream, or a manipulated frame sequence pushed into the authentication session can defeat systems that never receive a genuine live capture in the first place. Defeating this requires hardening the entire capture path, binding authentication events to live sessions, and using attestation controls to verify that media originated from a trusted capture process. This is precisely the kind of layered, architecturally rigorous defense that companies like Daon have invested in building—and it represents a materially different security posture than the commodity facial recognition bolted onto a web portal that the Journal’s framing evokes.

Rodriguez also raises the issue of morphing attack detection, a threat that is largely ignored in almost all mainstream press coverage. A morph attack blends two individuals’ images into a single identity document photo convincing enough that both people can later match against it, enabling fraud in document issuance, border workflows, and remote onboarding pipelines.

Any serious risk assessment of biometric systems needs to include it. The WSJ’s five-point consumer checklist does not.

Where the Privacy Advocates Are Right

Rodriguez’s rebuttal is not a blanket defense of every biometric deployment, and this commentary isn’t either. The privacy professionals Munk quotes are not wrong about everything, and it’s worth being clear about where they land on solid ground.

Retention matters. The article is correct that most U.S. states lack meaningful guardrails on how long biometric data is kept, what it can be used for, and who it can be disclosed to. Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act is widely regarded as the strongest framework, but it is the exception. The FTC requirement to publish privacy policies is, as the article notes, functionally weak when those policies are dense with jargon that consumers cannot parse and contain vague assurances about encryption quality that tell you nothing about the strength of actual safeguards.

Rodriguez agrees with all of this. He writes explicitly: “retention matters, deletion rights matter, privacy notices are often poor, and many U.S. legal protections remain uneven.” Consumers, he says, “should ask harder questions before enrolling in any convenience-driven biometric trial.”

The difference between his position and the Journal’s is not on those facts. It is on the conclusion. The WSJ implies the answer is consumer avoidance of biometrics. Rodriguez—and the companies building to enterprise-grade standards—argue that the answer is better regulation, clearer standards, and a clear-eyed distinction between irresponsible deployments and well-governed ones.

That distinction is not subtle. There is a profound difference between a retail loyalty pilot with vague data retention language and no independent PAD testing, and a Daon-grade enterprise platform built around data minimization, cryptographically protected references, continuously updated anti-spoofing, and layered security controls. The Journal treats them as the same thing. They are not, and consumers and regulators deserve to know it.

The Track Record the Article Ignores

Rodriguez closes his rebuttal with a point the Journal’s framing obscures entirely: the pandemic settled part of this debate empirically.

When branch offices closed across six continents in 2020 and 2021, financial institutions, healthcare providers, and governments moved billions of identity verifications to remote biometric onboarding. Consumers opened bank accounts, verified identities for government benefits, and accessed regulated services entirely from home by scanning government IDs, taking a selfie, and completing a biometric match against a Daon or comparable system.

The most risk-averse, most heavily regulated institutions in the world evaluated this technology under real pressure and found it secure enough not only to maintain but to expand. Adoption has grown steadily since precisely because consumers, corporations, and regulators found it worked.

What This Framing Costs

A piece in the Wall Street Journal warning consumers away from biometric authentication will be read by legislators drafting bills, compliance officers setting enterprise policy, and consumers deciding whether to use a biometric payment terminal or fall back on a credit card. In each case, the article’s framing points toward the wrong conclusion.

The fraud industry knows what happens when organizations retreat from stronger authentication to more familiar but weaker alternatives. Fraud rates climb. Account takeover accelerates. The criminals who have spent years perfecting credential theft find themselves operating in a target-rich environment, largely undisturbed.

The right response to the real risks the WSJ identifies—inadequate retention rules, weak consent requirements, insufficient regulatory oversight—is better governance of biometric systems, not abandoning the technology in favor of credentials that have already failed at scale.

Biometrics are not magic, and they are not risk-free. Rodriguez says so plainly. But the technology, deployed by companies like Daon with the architecture, governance, and anti-spoofing discipline the work demands, is measurably more secure than what it replaces.
The Wall Street Journal owed its readers that context. Its absence is where the article, despite its legitimate instincts, does real harm.