The High Stakes of Biometrics: This Week’s Top Stories

It’s been another varied week in biometrics news, but the latest roundup of FindBiometrics’ top stories has a particular feeling of weightiness with respect to ongoing conversations around biometrics, privacy, and ethics. A few of the items in this week’s roundup really underline the stakes in these issues.

For a start, it doesn’t get much heavier than the matter of the US Capitol riots last week. So FindBiometrics readers were understandably interested in the reporting on the role that facial recognition has played in the aftermath, with XRvision revealing that its technology identified members of Neo-Nazi organizations among the rioters – and not Antifa protestors, contrary to a report from Washington Times:

XRVision Uses Facial Recognition to Identify Nazis Participating in Capitol Riot in DC

Meanwhile, in South Africa, a government plan to collect the fingerprint and face biometrics of every child born in the country has started to get some pushback from privacy advocates, illustrating another high-stakes application of biometric technology:

South Africa’s Biometric Registration Plan Draws Concern from Privacy Advocates

Readers also showed interest in a more proactive approach to biometric ethics from facial recognition specialist AnyVision. At a Fordham University Law School conference entitled “Facial Recognition: Challenges and Solutions”, the company laid out some best practices that can help to assuage concerns about privacy and potential abuses of biometric technology:

AnyVision Emphasizes Need for Ethical and Unbiased Facial Recognition Systems

On a lighter note, this week also brought some more attention to the emergence of biometric payment cards, with IDEX Biometrics detailing some of the design features that it believes help its own fingerprint-scanning card solution to stand out:

IDEX Explains How TrustedBio Reduces Manufacturing Cost of Biometric Cards

And finally, readers showed interest in a set of predictions about what’s to come on the fraud front in 2021, care of Experian. With a few key trends that accelerated in the wake of COVID-19 carrying on into the new year, Experian is particularly concerned about synthetic identity fraud:

Experian Warns About Synthetic Identities and COVID Scams in Future of Fraud Predictions

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Stay posted to FindBiometrics next week as we continue to bring you the latest news and interviews from the exciting world of biometrics. To see the hottest stories of the week in mobile digital identity, visit our sibling site Mobile ID World.

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January 16, 2021 – by Alex Perala