Privacy in the Spotlight: This Week’s Top Biometrics Stories

Privacy and ethics are top of mind in this week’s roundup of FindBiometrics’ most popular articles, as many readers continue to mull over the results of our annual Year in Review Survey.

Indeed, one of the most popular posts of the past week was our announcement of the 19th Annual FindBiometrics Year in Review Report. Designed to offer a comprehensive illustration of how the biometrics industry sees itself and its trajectory, this year’s report shows the ongoing impact of the pandemic and how its various impacts and challenges are changing the identity security industry – and in many cases driving up demand. The report also puts privacy and related ethical concerns in the spotlight, with a general consensus emerging that these represent one of the most important challenges for the biometrics industry to overcome:

Face Biometrics, Privacy, and Finance: Download the 19th Annual FindBiometrics Year in Review Report

On that note, Oosto has been seeking to distinguish itself as a facial recognition company that treats privacy as a matter of paramount importance. This week, it continued to draw readers’ attention with its pointed criticism of Clearview AI and the latter company’s disregard for privacy. Clearview has built a facial recognition platform by indiscriminately trawling the internet for photos of faces, a practice that Oosto CEO Avi Golan called “questionably legal and a serious violation of public privacy”:

Oosto Stands Against Clearview’s Private Sector Expansion

Trueface, meanwhile, got some attention this week in part by focusing on a related ethical concern about biometric technology. The company’s CEO penned a Medium post to recap some of its major accomplishments and to look ahead at the coming year; in so doing, he emphasized that Trueface has taken pains to minimize and kind of demographic bias in the accuracy of its facial recognition technology. Disparities in accuracy between racial groups, for example, can effectively lead to discriminatory outcomes when applied in large-scale use cases, such as passenger processing at airports:

Trueface Emphasizes Ethics and Airport Deployments in Look Ahead to 2022

Privacy also factored into a wider-ranging discussion about digital ID during the recent FindBiometrics Identity Summit. In a conversation with FindBiometrics Editor in Chief Peter Counter, Socure’s Jordan Burris and Matt Thompson tackled some of the issues pertinent to the government applications of digital ID technology, and a replay of the talk has proven popular with FindBiometrics visitors:

ON-DEMAND: Digital ID in the Public Sector

Finally, readers gave a lot of attention this week to a biometric technology that doesn’t entail a lot of privacy concerns: fingerprint-scanning payment cards. Rocker, a Swedish challenger bank, is preparing to commercially launch a biometric card solution provided by IDEX Biometrics and IDEMIA. The card lets users authorize a transaction with a simple fingerprint scan, and their biometric is stored on the card and never transmitted to a third party:

IDEX and IDEMIA Provide Biometric Card Tech for Swedish Challenger Bank

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Keep reading FindBiometrics to learn more about the exciting world of biometrics. You can also visit our sibling site Mobile ID World for the latest news in digital identity.

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March 5, 2022 – by Alex Perala