Government Biometrics in Focus in This Week’s News Roundup

Government biometrics are in the spotlight in this week’s roundup of FindBiometrics’ top stories, with a few news items demonstrating the security advantages – and the security risks – of the tech in different settings.

With respect to the risks, those have become abundantly clear in the wake of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. Following initial concerns that biometric HIIDE devices left behind by the US military had fallen into the hands of the Taliban, experts with knowledge of the situation have more recently been warning that the civil biometric infrastructure built by the coalition government may now be used by the Taliban to identify individuals who had been working with the previous government and its Western allies:

Policy Experts Raise Concerns About Afghanistan’s Biometric Databases

Closer to home (for Americans and some of their allies, at least), US Customs and Border Protection got some attention this week with its efforts to highlight the benefits of its Simplified Arrival program for Global Entry members. Simplified Arrival uses facial recognition to identify travelers at border control checkpoints, and was recently deployed at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport,:

CBP Pushes Facial Recognition for Global Entry Travelers

There was also some biometric national ID news this week, with IriTech announcing that the Sri Lankan government has opted to try its IriSentinel iris recognition solution in a Unique Digital Identity Pilot. The revelation came alongside the announcement that IriSentinel had become the first iris authentication device to achieve self-compliance with the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) SBI 2.0 (L1) Specification:

IriTech Provides Iris Scanners for Sri Lankan ID Program After After Successful MOSIP Self-compliance Test

Moving beyond the government sector, this week also brought the news of Avaya’s strategic investment in Journey.Ai. The companies, which share some DNA in Journey CEO and former Avaya executive Brett Shockley, have overlapping interests in applying biometric technology to call center applications:

Journey.Ai’s Face, Voice Biometrics Help to Attract Strategic Investment From Avaya

And finally, readers showed strong interest this week in Imprivata’s announcement that it has made its Imprivata OneSign and Imprivata Confirm ID solutions available through Microsoft Azure. The development will further extend Imprivata’s identity management solutions to healthcare providers:

Imprivata Brings OneSign and Confirm ID to Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform

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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September 4, 2021 – by Alex Perala

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