Biometrics

More than decade ago, near Kandahar, Afghanistan, the U.S. military employed one of its Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit (SEEK II) devices for the last time. The piece of tech, a chunky black rectangle used to scan fingerprints and irises, was turned off and stowed away. That is, until August 2022 when Matthias Marx, a German security researcher, bought the device for $68 off of eBay (a steal, at about half the the listed price). But that’s not all. For the low, low price of less than $70, Marx had inadvertently also…

Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)From dumping out water bottles to picking easy to slip off shoes, most air travelers have grown accustomed to the regulatory and bureaucratic dance that is navigating major airports. Increasingly, however, travelers may soon encounter a new accessory en route to their destination: a facial recognition scan. Private airliners, from Delta to American, have experimented with some form of optional facial recognition services for flight check ins for years, as has The Transportation Security…

ID.me, the controversial biometric identification verification company whose facial match technology provoked a major privacy backlash at the IRS earlier this year, may have misled the public and lawmakers when its CEO claimed the U.S. lost $400 billion to fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims. Its biometric services, billed as a convenient and secure way to reduce pandemic related unemployment fraud, may have actually made it more difficult for those most in need of assistance to receive their aid. That new evidence,…

Zhao developed a method to use synthetic models to generate fake palm-print data—creating massive datasets that resemble creases in palms without using real palm photos. While the data isn’t collected from real people, it can still be used to improve the recognition algorithm, according to a paper Zhao submitted to the European Conference on Computer Vision in 2022. “Once we have generated about 200,000 to 300,000 images, the precision rate will be close to 100%. That’s a clear improvement,” he says. Previously, the…

A photo of a computer screen running “Real Time Face Detector” software shows visitors’ expressions analyzed and explained in real-time at the stand of the Fraunhofer Institute at the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover on March 6, 2008. The Real Time Face Detector is a software module that can be used for fast face detection in video streams and single pictures.Photo: John MacDougal (Getty Images)The head of the United Kingdom’s independent privacy watchdog worries highly hyped efforts to use AI to detect people’s emotional…

Photo: The Monitor (AP)Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the state is suing Google for allegedly collecting biometric data from millions of Texans without consent, his office said in a press release Thursday. The case is part of a recent flood of lawsuits against tech companies over biometrics, which measure physical characteristics like faces and fingerprints. But this new lawsuit makes an unusual and potentially gamechanging argument: Paxton alleges Google violated the privacy of people who aren’t even Google…

Security camera footage from inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas as a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers while hundreds of police officers waited outside.Screenshot: Austin American-StatesmanPublic school districts in Texas will soon start offering DNA and fingerprint kits to families of students as part of a law to help identify children in case of an “emergency,” according to a new report from the Houston Chronicle. And while the law never explicitly says it’s for identifying kids whose bodies may be…

In November 2021, Facebook announced it would delete face recognition data extracted from images of more than 1 billion people and stop offering to automatically tag people in photos and videos. Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University, in Canada, told WIRED at the time that he considered the policy change a PR tactic because the company’s VR push would likely lead to the expanded collection of physiological data and raise new privacy concerns.This week, Stark’s prediction proved right. Meta, as the…

Aadhaar card holders will be encouraged by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to voluntarily update their biometric data every ten years. As per a report, officials have stated that the government body will push people to update their facial and fingerprint scans connected to their Aadhaar card over time. People aged above 70 years will reportedly be exempt from the prompt. Currently, children aged between five to 15 years are required to update their biometrics. Aadhaar enrolment of children aged below…

Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline alliance, wants roughly half its 26 members to use biometrics technology by 2025, as passenger demand grows for contactless travel and less airport congestion after COVID-19. By increasing the number of airport touchpoints where passengers can use biometrics technology, such as facial comparison which allows someone to use their face as a boarding pass, Star Alliance hopes to reduce processing time through airport security, baggage drop, departure gates, and lounges. The group…