A multi-city teahouse chain in India is coming under fire for its use of facial recognition to identify customers. Ostensibly, the face scanning technology is used only in Chaayos’ loyalty program, enabling the teahouse chain to link enrolled customers’ payment accounts to their faces. But one unhappy customer – and editor of what the BBC…
As another big year in the biometrics industry reaches its conclusion, it’s time once again to reflect on the state of the art through FindBiometrics’ Year in Review survey. Now in its 17th year, the Year in Review survey is the biggest of its kind in the biometrics industry. Thanks to FindBiometrics’ unique readership of…
Detroit lawmakers are expressing concern about law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology. City council member Roy McCalister, Jr. will be discussing the technology at an upcoming community forum, while US Representative Brenda Lawrence is planning to introduce legislation that would regulate the technology at the federal level. The Detroit Board of Police Commissioners formally…
City officials in Detroit have come to a compromise on police use of facial recognition technology, with an oversight committee clearing it for criminal investigations but banning the technology’s use in live surveillance. Police in Detroit had first started using facial recognition software in 2017, with Detroit City Council having approved its purchase. But as…
“The efforts reflect the larger, increasingly contentious debate around facial recognition technology, which largely revolves around the axes of privacy advocates’ fears of Big Brother-style surveillance, and police organizations’ insistence that it offers a useful security and policing tool.” Fight for the Future, a non-profit advocacy group aimed at promoting a free internet, is now…
One of the world’s biggest insurers is warning about the risks of biometric privacy legislation. The warning comes by way of Chubb’s latest Cyber InFocus report, with Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (or “BIPA”) being singled out as one of two salient digital issues in the insurance industry right now. (The other, ‘iEncrypt’, is a…
A seemingly innocuous test of a biometric attendance tracking system has resulted in Sweden’s first GDPR fine. The fine of 200,000 Swedish Krona was applied by the Swedish Data Protection Authority, or DPA, to the municipality of Skellefteå after it had trialed an attendance tracking system based on facial recognition technology at the Anderstorp High…
The United Kingdom’s tax authority has until June 5th to delete 5 million voice recordings that were used to provide biometric authentication for British citizens. The program dates back to 2017, when HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) began asking callers to use the phrase “My voice is my password” to register their voice biometrics and…