Happy New Year everybody! After a holiday pause I have prepared a short summary of stories that caught my eye in the biometric industry. Find out more about phishing attacks, account creation fraud and more. Enjoy!
Biometrics
Children still not being registered properly
Right to be recognized as an individual by the state is a fundamental one. Still, one in four children under age 5 (166 million), on average according to UNICEF, are not registered in the world today, which means that they can later on face issues with accessing services or calling on their rights.
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| Source: data.unicef.org |
US has passed a bill to fight deep-fakes
House of Representatives has passed Identifying Outputs of Generative Adversarial Networks Act unanimously, which is pretty unusual from my impression of US politics. This should, for example, assure funding for research into deep-fakes.
Chine tried to get World Bank funding for surveillance
World Bank supports many programs to fight poverty for example. Chinese apparently tried to get some of these funds to buy surveillance technology for on of it’s regions. While bio-metrics is helping in humanitarian programs all over the world, this seems to be bit fishy.
Phishing attacks to fool digital on-boarding
Fight against malicious actors is always ongoing. Currently, lot of institutions is using digital on-boarding capturing selfie and photo of an ID card to register and verify users. Now it seems that scammers had start building databases of just such pairs of images. Now the liveness technology is more important than ever.
10 or more police forces in Europe are using facial biometrics
10 we know of, some countries or local police forces did not provide answers, so there may be more of. The use on itself does not have to be an issue, the implementation can.
How to prevent account creation fraud
Biometrics may come to the rescue when it comes to fake accounts, which are flooding the internet. And it is getting worse, there was a 13% increase in fraudulent account creation in the first 6 months of 2019, as compared to the last 6 months of 2018.
Biometric credit cards are coming
While chip is more secure than magnetic stripes (I do not understand why stripes are still used today), PIN cannot confirm that the holder of a card is actually the owner. Biometrics will change that.
What to expect in 2020
It is not only about credit cards. Market growth, deep-fakes, decentralized IDs and more coming in the near future. Read more here.
Other
Image database which fools machine learning models
Researchers from IBM and MIT have created a data-set that is hard for a lot of used machine learning models that are able to detect objects.
Emotion detection is BS
Researchers are warning against using emotion detection, as it is unreliable and confirms biases.