It refers to the very real problem of theft from businesses, which according to the recently released Retail Theft Barometer, was a US$98.6-billion global problem this year. Canadian retailers alone suffered an estimated US$3.6 billion in "stock loss from crime or waste."

According to that same survey, by the U.K.-based Centre for Retail Research, 42 per cent of those losses came from internal employee theft.

It's not just packets of pencils. Consider a high-end retailer such as Toronto-based Holt Renfrew. They sell $1,500 purses and $485 mink-lined gloves. Suppose, just suppose, one of their salespeople was a bad apple. It has happened.

Several years ago I was given a behind-the-scenes tour of Holt Renfew's flagship Toronto store. An employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained that the store hires temporary help for busy periods like the holiday season.

One of these seasonal clerks could easily take a purse from the shelf and ring it in as a return, with the money going to his or her own credit card. Of course, the fraud might be detected later.

But, my source explained, crafty temps were ringing in the returns on another clerk's employee number. Months later, some loyal permanent saleslady found herself interrogated for a crime she never committed, while the larcenous temp was long gone.

Holt's director of information technology Anne Hodkin doesn't want to discuss specific cases, but acknowledges that "some funky stuff was going on" and that "some employees were retired from the business" for cheating at the till.

She points with pride to a biometric system installed at the store's point-of-sales (POS) terminals in 2001. To make a transaction, the clerk is now required to tap a finger on a fingerprint scanner made by California-based Digital Persona Inc.

"The scanners paid for themselves in three months," says Hodkin. They cost Cdn$120 each, and are discreetly hidden under glass in most locations. After all, the Holt Renfrew experience is supposed to be about those "Must Have Gifts" (the store's current promotion) such as mink-lined gloves, not the nasty mechanics of credit card processing and employee verification.

Hodkin credits the idea of using POS biometrics to an employee who came from the hospital sector. "They need to know which doctor is allowed to deal with a patient," she says, "so they're quite accepting of things like fingerprint readers."

She says that she did have some kickback from the company's management, who were worried about how employees would react to the system. However, "employees really like it, because they want to be accountable for what they do," she says.

The system also records time and attendance, eliminating the practice called "buddy punching," where one employee covers for another. Hodkin says this has improved the work climate, because "now somebody can't expect you to cover for them, since you don't have their finger."

While loss prevention was certainly a driver for Holt's biometric system, Hodkin says another great benefit was eliminating passwords. "Forty per cent of the calls to my helpdesk were for forgotten passwords," she laughs.

Now, she's looking at expanding the system to the company's other applications, especially systems that employees use infrequently, such as performance management. "They might log in once a quarter or once a year to some of these systems, and we get a lot of forgotten passwords," Hodkin says.

She notes that many laptops now have integrated finger scanners and adds she just made a breakthrough with the vendor in terms of getting the finger-scan system working with Microsoft's Active Directory. Her goal is to "walk up to my computer, put down my finger, have it say 'Hi Anne' and get me into exactly the right systems."

Holt Renfrew is not alone in using finger scans for time and attendance tracking. Peek at the employee entrance of the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, or the kitchen door of Calgary's International Hotel, and you'll see readers for employees to punch in and out. The data can go directly to a payroll system or even (shudder) to one of those nasty robocallers that tells Mom and Dad when Junior has skipped school.

Schools are also jumping on the finger-scan bandwagon. The biggest application is LunchByte Systems, which is deployed in 8,000 school districts in all 50 U.S. states.

Many of their systems use fingerprint scanners to keep bullies from stealing Johnny's lunch money or ID card, since there is no money or card to steal. (There are finger-scanning systems with "live finger" detection technology, but let's hope that's overkill even for U.S. schools.)

Canadian educational institutions have lagged behind the U.S. in introducing fingerprint readers and some say this is a good thing for privacy reasons.

For the record, getting set up on a fingerprint scan system is easy, painless and it doesn't really mean that your CSI-quality fingerprints are stored away in some Big Brother system.

In a white paper on its corporate website, fingerprint scanner vendor Digital Persona reassures consumers that it never stores an image of their fingerprint. Rather, the information from the print is stored as a small, encrypted numeric file.

They also thought about the problem of the latent fingerprint that you leave on the scanner after you use it, and claim to have proprietary technology that removes such images.

Still, there's that nagging reluctance to give up any of our precious personal information. It's the reason some eligible people refuse to get the eye-reading Nexus border crossing card. Nexus is cheaper than the Canada-only Canpass, and it lets you into both Canada and the U.S. But, as the girl in the Nexus/Canpass enrolment centre told me, "some people just don't want the U.S. to have their bio information."

I guess people who seek to jealously guard their bio-data won't be working at Holt Renfrew. Or renting SmarteCarte electronic storage lockers at Portland or Las Vegas airports or at the Statue of Liberty. Or putting their socks into a finger-scan controlled locker at Universal's Islands of Adventure Theme Park in Florida.

Like it or not, your finger is going to have a lot of new uses in the future, and life may be rather inconvenient if you choose to keep your hands in your pockets.

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)