The Japanese government has formally announced a plan this week to fight gambling addiction that include the use of biometric technology. The aim is to have operators of gambling facilities use facial recognition technology to automatically identify gambling addicts and restrict entry. Individuals’ faces would be added to such automated watch lists by request, either…
Shook, Hardy, and Bacon has added two biometrics specialists to its corporate litigation team in Illinois. The law office has announced that attorneys Melissa Siebert (a new Partner) and Erin Bolan Hines (Of Counsel) will be handling complex biometrics lawsuits as members of the firm’s Business Litigation, Employment and Privacy and Data Security Practices department.…
Amazon is now calling for government regulation of facial recognition technology, even as it defends sales of its own such technology to law enforcement authorities. In a new post on the Amazon Web Services Machine Learning blog, the company’s VP of Global Public Policy, Michael Punke, writes, “We support the calls for an appropriate national…
The heart of Silicon Valley could become the first place where AI-driven facial recognition technology is banned, if proposed legislation is put into place. The proposition comes from San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Aaron Peskin. It would implement new requirements for police to obtain approval from the city’s Board of Supervisors before purchasing new…
An agreement to facilitate the sharing of biometric data between police authorities in Japan and the US has taken effect, The Japan Times reports. The deal concerns Japan’s National Policy Agency and America’s FBI and Department of Homeland Security. The countries first came to the agreement in 2014. While there were already previous agreements in…
The Illinois Supreme Court has issued its ruling on a pivotal case concerning the state’s biometric privacy law, with a unanimous decision upholding its broad scope. The case, Rosenbach v. Six Flags, was brought forward by the mother whose son was, at the age of 14, fingerprinted at the Six Flags amusement park as part…
“Even if government authorities can’t make Aadhaar authentication mandatory, they can still accept it from citizens who prefer to use it.” Just a few months after a Supreme Court ruling laid out restrictions to how India’s national biometric ID program can be used, the national government has amended legislation governing the Aadhaar program to make…
A lawsuit against Google based on the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, has been dismissed by a district court judge – but that doesn’t mean the case is closed for good. The case was launched in 2016 by a woman who unwittingly had her imaged captured by a Google Photos user in 11…
“…the legislation will offer citizens a six-month window in which they can choose to opt out of the Aadhaar program, with their iris and fingerprint data deleted from the Aadhaar database.” The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is preparing legislation that will allow citizens to withdraw from Aadhaar, India’s biometric national ID program. According…
A case that could ultimately defang Illinois’ biometric privacy law is now underway before the state’s Supreme Court. It revolves around the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, a law passed back in 2008 that essentially requires organizations to obtain informed consent from individuals before collecting their biometric data. The biometric revolution in consumer…
The head of London’s Metropolitan Police Service is decrying the “complex regulatory system” in place over how law enforcement authorities in the UK can use facial recognition technology. Speaking to The Guardian after a week that saw five murders over the course of six days in the city, Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick said, “We…
Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has a potentially powerful new defender in the state’s newly-elected Attorney General, Kwame Raoul. The law, passed a decade ago, is aimed at protecting citizens’ privacy rights with respect to their biometric data, with a central component being a requirement that any companies collecting such data obtain clear consent.…
The first case has emerged of police compelling a criminal suspect to unlock their iPhone X using Face ID, Apple’s infrared facial recognition system. As Forbes‘ Thomas Brewster reports, the case has emerged from Columbus, Ohio, where FBI investigators ordered a man suspected of trafficking in child pornography to unlock his iPhone with a face…
“This ruling comes a little over a year after the Supreme Court’s ruling last summer that privacy is a fundamental right of Indian citizens…” India’s Supreme Court has issued a new ruling that seeks to limit the reach of Aadhaar, the country’s ambitious biometric national ID program. According to a new Reuters report, the ruling…
A new piece of legislation aimed at facilitating the sharing of biometric intelligence on foreigners posing a potential security threat to the US has passed through the House Homeland Security Committee. Dubbed the “Biometric Identification Migration Alert Program (BITMAP) Authorization Act of 2018”, the bill passed by a vote of 20-7. The BITMAP program entails…
With government use of biometric technology becoming an increasingly sensitive issue in the public domain, an Irish government agency is waging a semantic battle over its use of facial recognition. The Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection has been using face matching technology for years now in a bid to thwart fraud. The technology…
Like pretty much any other groundbreaking technology, biometrics has long carried the promise of great social benefit and the risk of potential abuse. It has always been exciting and controversial. But those qualities have only intensified as biometric technologies have advanced in their sophistication. Today, systems are emerging that can identify people through public security…
“Essentially, the court will decide whether the law should concern the unauthorized collection of biometric data alone, or whether alleged victims of malfeasance should have to prove that they have actually been somehow injured or wronged through the collection of such data.” The Illinois Supreme Court is poised to make a major ruling on how…
The UK’s Biometrics Commissioner is not satisfied with the recently published Home Office Biometrics Strategy. In a formal response to the Strategy, which was issued last week, Biometrics Commissioner Paul Wiles bemoaned the document’s lack of detail about where the UK government’s use of biometric technology is headed, asserting that it “says little about what future…