Microsoft Biometric products - biometric identity theft risk?

I'm quite interested in these new microsoft biometric products, as I recently saw the keyboard and mouse package down at the local PC World, and at only about £70 it seems like a good deal.



The keyboard, in my opinion, looks quite nice (better than my budget one I have now) and the idea of being able to sign on without remembering passwords and usernames is appealing from a practical point of view and also becasue I like my gadgets!

Will the implentation of this sort of technology make us more used to have our biometric information stored on file though? And is it a good or bad idea?

Another concern is that your fingerprints are going to be stored on your computer somehow, I imagine this information is encrypted but how difficult would it be for a hacker to gain access to the informaion for some form of identity theft?

An article on the products is here

I'm curious, but have biometric scanners overcome the problem of generating errors when fingers have cuts and such on them? I recall this being a minor problem, but I'm not sure if it's been fixed yet.

It would also be interesting if someone could find introductions to programming these biometric products on Microsoft technologies such as the .NET Framework and its encompassed languages.