Face Biometrics, From Different Angles: This Week’s News Roundup

In this week’s roundup of FindBiometrics’ top stories, facial recognition is in the spotlight – sometimes in a flattering light, and sometimes not.

For an example of the former, we can look to Mexico City’s Benito Juarez borough, where VSBLTY’s computer vision technology was installed in surveillance cameras in a smart city project. VSBLTY was drawing attention this week to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography indicating that residents of the borough have felt increasingly safer since the technology was deployed, illustrating the security benefits of AI and facial recognition:

Survey Shows Mexico City Residents Feel Safer With VSBLTY Surveillance Tech

Oosto, meanwhile, was emphasizing how facial recognition could (and should) be used ethically. The recently rebranded company published an e-book emphasizing the benefits of facial recognition technology across areas such as law enforcement, financial services, and airport screening, while also acknowledging the risks of ethical malfeasance if proper safeguards are not in place. For its part, Oosto lays out a number of its own ethical guidelines:

Oosto eBook Makes Case for Ethical Facial Recognition

For a more ambiguous take on facial recognition, we can turn to Facebook. The platform’s head of AI announced this week that Facebook will no longer use facial recognition to automatically tag individuals in photos uploaded by users. In doing so, he cited “concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society” and the uncertain regulatory environment around the technology. But he also insisted on facial recognition’s benefits, and explained that Facebook would continue to use the technology in certain applications:

Citing ‘Societal Concerns’, Facebook Dials Back Facial Recognition, Looks to On-device Approach

One of those applications is in identifying end users who get locked out of their accounts. And it’s this kind of remote identity verification that also appeals to many other organizations, including the crypto exchange Simplex, which has opted to use facial recognition for customer onboarding. Its vendor of choice for the biometric technology is Onfido:

Onfido Provides Biometric Onboarding for Simplex Crypto Exchange

And finally, facial recognition also factored into a popular guest post from HID Global’s Roland Fournier, who explains the importance of combatting the threat of presentation attacks using liveness detection. HID’s multispectral imaging technology is particularly good at this, and can be used not only for facial recognition, but for fingerprint scanning as well:

Not All Biometric Authentication Is Created Equal

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Stay tuned to FindBiometrics for the latest news from the exciting world of biometrics. You can also visit our sibling site Mobile ID World to read the latest about digital identity.

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November 6, 2021 – by Alex Perala