The study, released this week, was independently conducted by the Ponemon Institute to capture the perceptions of individuals in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America on methods and technologies for managing identity within business and government organizations, Unisys said. In addition, the study looked at how individuals' sense of privacy affects their views on new ID management technologies such as biometrics.

'The No. 1 issue we were interested in exploring and we were interested to learn about was attitudes in different regions of the world regarding authentication technology use and acceptability,' said Mark Cohn, vice president for homeland security solutions at Unisys.

'There have been a lot of concerns about privacy and a lot of issues where businesses and government have been trying to deal with authentication problems but in sort of an isolated way," he said. What Unisys wanted to know was if there were "some kind of convergence and interoperability standards, would people be comfortable or uncomfortable with that.'

Cohn said Unisys' thesis was that a single, general strategy for ID authentication that could be adopted by businesses and governments -- and was interoperable worldwide -- would be more efficient than the varying systems now in place.

'There's an opportunity to save money, do a better job with security and be more convenient for consumers if people are comfortable with a convergence study,' he said.