What Role Will Biometrics Play in the Cyber Cold War? We’re About to Find Out

ID Tech for June 16, 2022

After a previous ID Tech column laid out the challenging funding landscape that private biometrics companies will face now that the tech bubble has burst, last week’s feature pivoted to the brighter-looking prospects of the facial recognition segment in particular. Yes, the entire biometrics industry will have to compete more aggressively – or at least more effectively – to win over hesitant venture capitalists; and yes, a number of vendors that don’t have their act together are going to falter and fail; but the facial recognition segment in particular is already far past its VC funding peak in 2018, and it’s an area in which technology has evolved quickly along with an industrial ecosystem that now features third-party regulatory and testing regimes that can help the best vendors to demonstrate the effectiveness of their solutions.

That was the gist of the argument. But there’s another important factor that could serve to protect the facial recognition sector, and indeed the biometrics industry in general, amid what looks to be a bear market: geopolitics – or, given the extent to which international relations are now playing out in the digital sphere, perhaps we should say something like ‘cyberpolitics’.