A row has erupted over large-scale facial matching. Speaking

at AllThingsD’s D9 Conference, run by The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, Eric Schmidt, Google’s exec-utive chairman said Google had built but ‘withheld’ facial recognition tech-nology. “As far as I know it’s the only technology Google built and after looking at it we decided to stop,” he says. Schmidt expressed particular concerns about the combination of facial recognition and mobile track-ing, fearing the technology could be used against citizens.

In an earlier report in The Daily Telegraph, Schmidt said that a database using facial rec-ognition advances was ‘unlikely’ to be a service that Google would create. He suggested another company will cross what he has described as the ‘creepy line’.

The day after The Daily Telegraph report, on May 19, the US Patent and Trademark Office published a Google patent for a celebrity facial recognition database.

UK facial recognition vendor OmniPerception points out that concerns do not mean the tech-nology itself is flawed. Stewart Hefferman, CEO of OmniPerception, says, “We applaud Google

voicing these concerns around privacy and would echo their comments that uncontrolled web-based searches have the potential to misrepresent how the technology can benefit society”

“That doesn’t mean that face recognition is bad technology but that its use does need to be monitored and controlled.”

Hefferman welcomed public debate about the integrity of face recognition technology but he was concerned that it would create negative connotations that the technology was somehow flawed.

Google exec stokes facial recognition privacy debate

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NewsGoogle exec stokes facial recognition

privacy debate 1

Researchers find biometrics unpredictable in the real world 1

Government is biggest driver for smart cards and biometrics worldwide 2

Key pattern analysis adds biometric muscle to passwords 2

US security council details public-private partnerships driving biometrics 2

US Department of Defense extends multimodal work 3

Denmark migrates ePassport to EU standard 3

Malaysia and Pakistan in biometrics clampdown on illegal immigration 3

Playerbook identifies gamblers in the shadows 3

Fulcrum Biometrics fingers iPod Touch 12

Canadian police get real-time fingerprint and palm ID system 12

Cross Match works with Argentinean government 12

Features Passport to payment authenticationAlthough some exciting developments are

underway in access control and e-passports, John Elliott of Consult Hyperion asks is this technology ready to support payments? 5

The privacy imperativeSteve Gold looks at some of the major privacy

issues and developments affecting the global biometrics industry. 9

RegularsEvents Calendar 3

News in Brief 4

Product News 4

Company News 4

Comment 12

Contents

biometricTECHNOLOGY

ISSN 0969-4765 June 2011 www.biometrics-today.com

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privacy

Eric Schmidt: not crossing the ‘creepy line’.

research

Researchers find biometrics unpredictable in the real world

High profile academics in the field of biometrics have published a

paper stating that the level of uncer-tainty in biometric systems remains high and it is often unclear how reli-able systems will be in real-world implementations.

‘Fundamental issues in biometric performance testing: A modern statistical and philosophi-cal framework for uncertainty assessment’ by James Wayman, Antonio Possolo, and Anthony Mansfield discusses the measurement of techni-cal performance of biometric systems and the

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