Biometric Update

Australian biometric identity authentication firm Grabba has signed a new, “significant contract” with United Arab Emirates telecommunications company Du Telecom, its CEO Jon Carter has announced.

The Maryville Forum reports that Missouri retailers could soon perform age verification using biometric methods such as facial recognition or palm screening, after a bill permitting biometric systems for alcohol sales passed in the state House last month. Under HB 2599, Missouri retailers would be allowed to use biometrics to verify the age of customers buying alcohol, provided the customers have enrolled a government-issued ID with the relevant biometric verification vendor.

A new application of Global ID ’s finger vein biometrics to help reduce HIV Infections among vulnerable young people is launching in Namibia in partnership with Project HOPE.

U.S. government agencies are adapting in real time to a digital landscape transformed by AI, identity fraud, deepfakes and biometric technologies.

Victoria reports 200,000 people signing up for mobile driving licenses (mDLs) within the first 48 hours of their introduction this week. The latest Australian state ’s mDL rollout, however, has not all been smooth sailing as some establishments discovered that the digital IDs do not work with their scanners.

Several key job changes have recently been made in the fields of biometrics, fraud prevention, and cybersecurity, including at Aware, Trulioo, a Dutch government agency, Synaptics, Sift and Saviynt.

Despite skepticism among American consumers, biometric payments in retail are about to have a moment, according to some experts. These sentiments are supported by data such as those from Goode Intelligence which shows that the global biometric payment volume could be almost US$6 trillion by 2026. Here is the latest news from this field.

Biometric national ID cards top the most-read news of the week on Biometric Update, between a contract in Cameroon for Augentic and one in Bahrain for Thales. Government spending and biometrics contracts more generally made news this week, with funding secured in Malawi and Australia, and Garsu Pasaulis winning a contract for border biometrics in Zimbabwe. Fingerprint biometrics continue to make headlines, with Fingerprint Cards, Idex Biometrics and Zwipe making deals on smart cards and Innovatrics and Omnigarde reporting NIST benchmarking results.

The evaluation metrics used to assess the performance of biometric systems are important but not necessarily easy to understand.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology divided the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) into two separate sets of biometric evaluations in 2023 – the Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) and the Face Analysis Technology Evaluation (FATE). This article will explore the different tracks for assessing facial recognition algorithms.