Controversy and Diplomacy: Identity News Digest

Welcome to FindBiometrics’ digest of identity industry news. Here’s what you need to know about the world of digital identity and biometrics today:

Healthcare Biometrics

The biometric patient identification system used by Kenya’s National Hospital Insurance Fund suffered a 48-hour outage over the weekend, with administrators blaming a faulty transformer. The biometric system replaced a previous, manual patient identification system last year, in an effort to prevent fraud and to improve efficiency. Administrators reverted to a manual patient intake system while repairs were underway.

Police Biometrics

Privacy and civil rights activists helped to set the tone for London’s new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police on his first day on the job. Fourteen groups, including Big Brother Watch and Liberty, sent Sir Mark Rowley a joint letter urging him to stop the police force’s use of facial recognition technology. The group said that they had been surveilling police activities at sites where the technology had been deployed, and claimed that 87 percent of its alerts about suspicions persons turned out to be false matches. The Met counters that under 0.08 percent of the system’s matches are false alerts.

Integrations

Precise Biometrics‘ fingerprint authentication software is being used in two new smartphones from Vivo. Both the X80Pro and the iQOO 10 Pro feature the BioMatch algorithm, thanks to its integration into Qualcomm’s 3D Sonic Max sensor, which is being used in each of the devices. Precise had announced Qualcomm’s integration of BioMatch into the 3D Sonic Max sensor, as well as the 3D Sonic Gen 2 sensor, last year.

Hisense is using speech recognition technology in a new TV, enabling users to interact with the television by voice command. In announcing the solution, Synaptics Director of Product Marketing Shay Kamin Braun hinted that the integration could lead to biometric utilities further down the road, with a reference to “upcoming innovations such as biometrics for voice authentication for online purchases”. Synaptics’ DBM10L Neural Processing Unit was integrated into a voice remote control unit, the EFR3B86H, which was paired with Hisense’s 65A9H 4K OLED TV.

Certifications

IDEMIA National Security Solutions has announced that it was appraised at Level 3 of ISACA’s Capability Maturity Model Integration, a which the company described as a “globally accepted standard for improving capability, optimizing business performance and aligning operations to business goals.” The appraisal was conducted by ChangeBridge Consulting LLC, and comes amid speculation that the broader IDEMIA organization is about to be put up for sale by parent company Advent International.

Contract Controversy

The US government has sent a diplomatic note to Liberia’s National Elections Commission asking for a sample of the organization’s planned 2023 national voter registration card. The request comes amid concerns about the Commission’s dealings with EKEMP, a China-based company that appears to be the Commission’s preferred partner for the provision of a biometric voter registration system, despite the fact that Liberia’s Public Procurement Concession Commission has not yet approved any particular vendor for the program. As a provider of aid for the country’s elections body, the US appears to have its own interest in investigating the matter.

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September 12, 2022 – by Alex Perala