Biometrics Institute Highlights Trust Issues in Annual Industry Survey

The Biometrics Institute has published its 13^th annual Industry Survey, which polls industry stakeholders to gain a better sense of current and future trends. This year’s survey underscored the importance of testing, and uncovered some security and privacy concerns.

On the testing front, the survey showed that the vast majority (86 percent) of respondents believe that liveness detection has taken on greater importance in the past few years, with another three-quarters of the respondents stating that deepfakes represent an existential threat to facial recognition technology. With that in mind, the respondents indicated that biometric developers needed to be testing their systems on an ongoing basis to make sure they are keeping pace with the next generation of cybercriminals. They also suggested that the growing certification ecosystem would help hold the industry to a certain standard.

Even though many pandemic restrictions have lifted, most respondents (60 percent) still believe mask recognition should be a top priority for facial recognition providers. They went on to argue that digital identity and AI will be two of the top areas of focus for biometric developers in the next five years.

However, the more interesting finding may be the fact that even some biometric stakeholders believe that some areas should be off-limits when it comes to biometric technology. The majority (57 percent) of those in the industry flagged privacy and data protection as a major concern that could hinder the growth of the entire sector. It is difficult to get the public to opt in when they do not trust biometric systems, and the irresponsible use of biometric tech (most notably in large-scale surveillance operations) can eat away at that relationship.

With that in mind, many of the respondents (30 percent) suggested that the industry should avoid social media and political applications, as well as certain school deployments (just over 25 percent). They also identified bias and a general lack of transparency as ongoing public concerns.

“The surveillance use case creates most of the controversy, not only for government but also in commercial uses,” said Biometrics Institute CEO Isabelle Moeller. “Privacy is the key concern and needs to be addressed through policy and process while testing and standards are essential ingredients for the choice of the technology.”

The Biometrics Institute argued that the results highlight the importance of its Three Laws of Biometrics. Those laws were published in 2020 to encourage ethical development.

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July 13, 2022 – by Eric Weiss