• Large-Scale Facial Recognition Is Incompatible with a Free Society

    In the U.S., tireless opposition to state use of facial recognition algorithms has recently won some victories. Outside the U.S., however, the tide is heading in the other direction. To decide whether to expand or limit the use of facial recognition technology, nations will need to answer fundamental questions about the kind of people, and the kind of society, they want to be. Face surveillance is based on morally compromised research, violates our rights, is harmful, and exacerbates structural injustice, both when it works and when it fails. Its adoption harms individuals, and makes our society as a whole more unjust, and less free. A moratorium on its use is the least we should demand.

  • Tightening Up Facial Biometrics

    Facial biometrics for security applications is an important modern technology. Unfortunately, there is the possibility of “spoofing” a person’s face to the sensor or detection system through the use of a photograph or even video presented to the security system. Researchers have now developed a way to thwart spoofing.

  • Lend Me Your Ears: Securing Smart-Home Entry with Earprints

    Fingerprints and DNA are well-known forms of biometrics, thanks to crime dramas on television and at the movies. But as technology drives us toward the Internet of Things—the interconnection of computer devices in common objects—other forms of biometrics are sure to enter the cultural consciousness beyond use as forensics tools such as face recognition and retinas, veins, and palm prints. Researchers say that “earprints” could one day be used as person identification to secure smart homes via smartphones.

  • A Face-Recognition Tech that Works Even for Masked Faces

    In these corona days, face-recognition technologies — used for a variety of security purposes — are severely challenged by the fact that everyone’s wearing protective masks. The Israeli company Corsight says it has solved that problem with autonomous artificial intelligence.

  • New Privacy Threat Combines Device Identification with Biometric Information

    A new study by computer scientists has revealed a new privacy threat from devices such as smartphones, smart doorbells and voice assistants that allows cyber attackers to access and combine device identification and biometric information.

  • Lawmaker Presses Clearview AI on Foreign Sales of Facial Recognition

    Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts earlier this week raised new concerns about Clearview AI’s facial recognition app. Markey initially wrote to Clearview in January 2020 with concerns about how the company’s app might violate Americans’ civil liberties and privacy. Clearview is marketing its product to users in foreign countries with authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia. The company might also be collecting and processing images of children from social media sites.

  • Forensic Proteomics: Going Beyond DNA Profiling

    A new book details an emerging forensic method that could become as widespread and trustworthy as DNA profiling. The method is called mass-spectrometry-based proteomics, which examines the proteins that make up many parts of living things. These proteins exist in unique combinations in everything from blood cells and clothing fibers to certain types of medicine and the diseases they fight. Because proteomics analyzes these proteins directly, forensic proteomics can fill in when DNA is missing, ambiguous, or was never present to begin with.

  • U.S. Plans to Collect DNA from Nearly a Million Immigrants Despite Charges It Violates Privacy

    The Trump administration is pushing ahead with a project that could lead to the government collecting DNA from hundreds of thousands of detained immigrants, some as young as 14 years old, alarming civil rights advocates. Once fully underway, the DNA program could become the largest U.S. law enforcement effort to systemically collect genetic material from people not accused of a crime.

  • Evaluating Effects of Race, Age, Sex on Face Recognition Software

    How accurately do face recognition software tools identify people of varied sex, age and racial background? According to a new study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the answer depends on the algorithm at the heart of the system, the application that uses it and the data it’s fed — but the majority of face recognition algorithms exhibit demographic differentials. A differential means that an algorithm’s ability to match two images of the same person varies from one demographic group to another.

  • Inside America’s First All-Biometric Airline Terminal

    People still need more than their faces to enter and exit America on international flights, but Brandi Vincent writes that a growing number of early-stage facial recognition deployments that aim to screen passengers with little human intervention are rolling out at airports across the country.

  • The Effects of Race, Age, Sex on Face Recognition Software

    How accurately do face recognition software tools identify people of varied sex, age and racial background? According to a new study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the answer depends on the algorithm at the heart of the system, the application that uses it and the data it’s fed — but the majority of face recognition algorithms exhibit demographic differentials.

  • Crack Down on Genomic Surveillance

    Across the world, DNA databases that could be used for state-level surveillance are steadily growing. Yves Moreau writes that “Now the stakes are higher for two reasons. First, as technology gets cheaper, many countries might want to build massive DNA databases. Second, DNA-profiling technology can be used in conjunction with other tools for biometric identification — and alongside the analysis of many other types of personal data, including an individual’s posting behavior on social networks.”

  • Facial-Recognition Technology: Closer to Utopia Than Dystopia

    Is facial recognition technology ushering in the age of Big Brother, allowing the government to monitor what we do everywhere we do it? “This is the image that the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), and a host of other alarmists are attempting to conjure in the minds of the media, elected officials, and the American public,” Robert Atkinson writes. But with the right regulations, “Americans can be safer and have more convenience with little or no reduction of our precious civil liberties.”

  • DHS Sued to Obtain Information about Rapid DNA Testing of Migrant Families at the Border

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this week to obtain information that will shine a light on the agency’s use of Rapid DNA technology on migrant families at the border to verify biological parent-child relationships. Refusing to provide DNA carries threat that children will be separated from families.

  • The DNA Database Used to Find the Golden State Killer Is a National Security Leak Waiting to Happen

    A private DNA ancestry database that’s been used by police to catch criminals is a security risk from which a nation-state could steal DNA data on a million Americans, according to security researchers. Antonio Regalado writes that spies could use a crowdsourced genetic ancestry service to compromise your privacy—even if you’re not a member.