US: IBIA wants NIST to do more for biometrics

NIST Urged to Expanded Role of Biometric Authentication (Find Biometrics)

...IBIA Vice Chairman Walter Hamilton pointed to recent years’ “surge in the use of biometric technologies for mobile banking and other e-authentication applications,” adding that “NIST should support this trend by providing guidance on how to ensure the effective implementation of biometrics as an authentication token rather than narrowly limiting its use.”

Enrolling a fingerprint in Windows 10

Windows Hello Biometric Authentication at Work in Windows 10 - Video (Softpedia)

Video (no audio) at the link.

Also, there is no mention of the fingerprint hardware used.

Still, if you've never seen a fingerprint enrollment before, you can see one now.

Biometrics for library convenience

Enabling patrons to log in and check out with a swipe of the finger (American Library Association)

Paul Sawyier Public Library implemented a biometric identification system in October 2008. Since then, patrons who sign up for a library card have the option to enroll in the finger identification system, which is required only when using the public computers and the media box located in the lobby. To check out materials or log on to computers using the system, a patron simply places his or her finger on the biometric scanner located at each station. Patrons checking out other materials can use their library cards as they always have.

Asia-Pacific region lagging in counter-terror biometrics

Interpol pushes for more use of biometrics to ID terrorists (Computerworld)

Interpol is calling for Asia Pacific authorities to make better usage of biometrics to identify members of terrorist groups such as ISIS.
...
“Europe provides 26 more times fingerprint data than the APAC region and 623 times more DNA data. Yet, we know the [APAC] region has the technology and does make use of it at national levels.”

The Europe-Asia comparison is even more dramatic considering the size of their respective populations.

Biometric facial matching for outbound Aussie passengers accelerated (Government News)

Australia’s Immigration and Border Protection authorities have revealed an accelerated plan for the rollout of new automated biometric facial recognition gates at Australian airports for outbound Australian passport holders and some travellers departing the country as part of $630 million counter-terrorism sweep.

India: Income tax department sees value in UID

I-T department exploring ways to seed PAN with Aadhaar (Live Mint)

The income tax department is exploring ways to hasten the pace of seeding permanent account number, or PAN, with the unique identity number Aadhaar, a move that will weed out duplicate PANs and help the government’s drive against tax evaders.

This would allow the Income Tax Department to maintain its own ID numbering system for its own purposes — they may tax entities such as corporations that don't have biometrics, after all — while harnessing Aadhaar for detecting tax fraud among individuals.

China: Regulators reluctant to allow online bank account creation

Chinese Regulators Put Brakes on Facial-Recognition for Payment (PYMNTS.com)

Currently, in China, a customer must physically appear at a bank to have his or her identity verified by an employee before he or she can open an account. There is a push in the industry, the report points out, for facial-recognition software to replace the need for a customer’s physical presence to conduct banking business.

China seems to be drawing a regulatory distinction between what ID requirements should be in place in order to open a bank account versus what ID requirements banks can use for authenticating transactions.

IBIA objects to TSA's planned identity management protocols for PreCheck

IBIA questions TSA plan on PreCheck expansion (Planet Biometrics)

The International Biometrics and Identification Association (IBIA) has objected to plans by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to exclusively use just biographic data solutions in an expansion of the PreCheck travel screening program.

There's an interesting quote in the piece that compares what the TSA is proposing to the fraud prevention techniques commonly used by credit card companies.

That alone should give pause. For credit card companies, fraud is an actuarial problem. Credit card companies earn 3-4% on every transaction plus interest fees for carried balances. There's plenty of room for both fraud and profit in that model.

The TSA's job is different, and perhaps their fraud prevention techniques should be, too.

Latest SecuGen Hamster fingerprint reader looks pretty slick

SecuGen Hamster Pro 20 (SecuGen)

Earlier versions of the optical fingerprint reader were much taller.

Souce: SecuGen

 

India: Biometric UID is good politics

For Modi government, UID the wild card that came good (Economic Times)

According to the Economic Survey, Aadhaar card enrolments were increasing at a rate of 2 crore per month. The government had seeded over 10 crore bank accounts with registered Aadhaar numbers by December 2014.

1 crore = 10 million

Massachusetts contemplating biometrics to curb welfare fraud

Bill proposes Mass. study implementation of fingerprinting, biometrics to reduce welfare fraud (MassLive)

Under the provision, the Department of Transitional Assistance and the Office of Health and Human Services would be required to study the feasibility of using biometrics - which includes fingerprints - to reduce fraud in public benefit programs.

The language, part of a $15.4 million amendment assembled by the House Committee on Ways and Means, cleared the House on a 158-0 vote Tuesday afternoon.

New York City actually implemented a system like this a few years back. It worked, too. Mayor Bloomberg liked it. Governor Cuomo didn't. Survey data at the time indicated that a majority (53%) of Americans favored such an approach.

See:
New York City: Fingerprints for Auditing Food Stamps (October, 2011)
Governor Proposes to Prevent New York City From Using Biometrics To Stem Welfare Fraud (May, 2012)

USAA mobile biometric authentication opt-in data

Biometrics Find Support from an Unlikely Demographic: Seniors (American Banker)

More than 400,000 USAA customers, five of whom are over 90 years old, have opted in to use biometrics (face, voice or touch) to authenticate themselves to the company's mobile banking application.

The median age for customers opting for biometrics is 3.5

About 7.5% are over the age of 65.

Four are in their nineties.

New biometrics advisors to focus on use cases

Market Research Firm Announces Biometrics Advisory Service (Find Biometrics)

Tractica’s approach is to focus on use cases, which Lockhart says “define the biometrics market opportunity.” The company has classified 142 use cases, and offers a profile specific to each with respect to “business function, industry, and modality.” And the advisory service consider a wide range of biometric modalities, from the widespread (fingerprint scanning, facial recognition) to the more obscure (electrocardiogram and DNA recognition).

Technology isn't an application, so the focus on use cases is appropriate.

Face rec in China

Current facial recognition technology can do more than guess your age, as businesses are finding out (Global Times)

Concluding quote:

Besides traditional application for a secure entry or time clock system, facial recognition technology can be used in other fields such as remote identification.

The market for facial recognition technology is ultimately decided by the population. China has an immense population, which makes it a potentially huge market, according to the report from Bosi Data Research Center.

"But customers should know that multimodal biometric identification is much safer than single biometric identification, especially when the technology is used in finance," Lü said. "We can't ensure the facial recognition technology can be 100 percent accurate, and it's safer if you can use other biometric identification together."

There's more good information at the link.

Fujitsu and NTT DoCoMo team up for mobile iris biometrics

NTT DoCoMo launches smartphone with iris unlock feature (PC World)

The Fujitsu prototype incorporated a high-speed, high-accuracy iris recognition algorithm developed by California-based Delta ID. Fujitsu said the error rate for the prototype is about one in 100,000.

Available in green, black and white, the Arrows NX F-04G is slated to be released at the end of this month in Japan for around ¥55,000 (US$460). There are no plans to sell it outside Japan.

I somehow missed the first mention of this collaboration in early March.

Biometrics companies attracting investment

FST Biometrics raises $15m from GMF Capital (Globes)

Uniken raises $2 million from Exfinity Venture Partners (Medianama)

India UID: Interesting de-duplication and exception stats

Over 9 crore Aadhaar enrolments rejected by UIDAI (Zee News)

Out of 823.3 million enrollments, 97.3 million (Approx. 12%) have been rejected for reasons of either quality or duplication.

This may seem to be high to some, or low to others. In the big picture, there is (or should be!) a cost-benefit analysis at the beginning of the project that gets at the expense of the process vs. the infallibility of the process. On the first pass, it might make sense to get the highest proportion of good enrollments with the most convenient process, then to engage in a more expensive enrollment process applied only to more difficult enrollments.

It's also important to note that the 97.3 million rejected enrollments contain both duplicate applications, which must be rejected and other applications where clerical error, fraud, or un-enrollable biometrics are the reason for rejection.

Another interesting statistic in the article is that only about 618,000 UID numbers have been issued under the "Biometric Exception Clause" which allows for creating UID numbers for people whose biometrics cannot be enrolled. That comes out to around 0.07%.

What that means is that (depending on the number of people waiting for a biometric exception) using a data set approaching a billion individuals, at least 99.3% of the population of India is biometrically enrollable within the existing UID enrollment process.

Note: The article uses the Indian numbering units crore and lakh.

1 crore = 10,000,000
1 lakh = 100,000


See also: UID applications without biometrics highly likely fraudulent

Payments: Visa has some catching up to do

Visa Focuses on mPayment Expansion, Biometric Security (Find Biometrics)

Visa is ramping up its efforts to get into the digital payments game with an expansion of its digital wallet service and more intensive investigations into biometric security.

Forecast: Key biometrics industries and applications - 2024

Biometrics Market Forecasts (Tractica)

Tractica’s forecasts indicate that key industries in the biometrics market over the next decade are likely to be finance, consumer devices, healthcare, and government, followed by enterprise applications, defense, education, law enforcement, and non-government organizations. Key use cases that are likely to drive biometrics revenue over the next decade include consumer device authentication, mobile banking, automated teller machines (cashpoints), government IT systems, point-of-sale transactions, pharmacy dispensing, and wearable device authentication.

Fingerprints help end 55-year fugitive search

Fingerprint ruse IDs Florida man as longtime Ohio fugitive (MSN)

Authorities in Florida say a ruse to get a man's fingerprints led to his arrest as a convicted killer who escaped an Ohio prison farm and disappeared for most of six decades.

Brevard County deputies say investigators with the U.S. Marshals Service in Ohio sought help to check out the man while chasing leads about Frank Freshwaters, an Akron man who escaped in 1959. Major Tod Goodyear says they created a ruse to get the man to sign papers, then matched the fingerprints to those from the decades-old arrest.

Biometrics aid in aid delivery

IOM Uses Biometrics to Aid Displaced in Democratic Republic of the Congo (MENAFN)

The lack of identity documents for IDPs in the Eastern DRC poses a challenge in targeting humanitarian assistance. Almost 80 per cent of adults living in sites having no form of identity documents. In response IOM launched a biometric registration pilot project in eight displacement sites around the city of Goma in June 2014.

Between June 2014 and April 2015 IOM took the fingerprints of nearly 16000 IDPs. In the context of food distributions the collected information is used to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches the most vulnerable and avoids duplication and fraud.

Biometrics are an inexpensive, fast and accurate way of setting up ad hoc ID systems from scratch. Those interested in development and disaster recovery, take note.

US: Federal prosecutors want to use voice biometrics in court

Prosecutors want to use hi-tech evidence in trial to identify voices of terrorists (Daily Mail)

Terrorism prosecutors in Brooklyn want to use sophisticated voice recognition evidence — the same technology used to identify ISIS butcher “Jihad John” — for the first time in a federal trial in the U.S., the Daily News has learned.

The novel part of this that prosecutors wish to use the technology in a Federal trial.

Voice biometrics have made news in a criminal trial before. This 2012 piece by Jeff Weiner of the Orlando Sentinel describes voice biometrics used by an expert witness in the trial of George Zimmerman.