Tag: biometrics

Mexican Government Delays Biometric Registration Deadline After Massive Public Resistance

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has announced an extension to a controversial deadline that required Mexican citizens and foreign residents to register their phone lines with their identification. The move comes after less than half of the country signed up to register their phone lines.

On Thursday morning, Mexico’s Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (CRT) announced a staggered extension for citizens to register their mobile phone lines with their identification. This controversial requirement has received pushback and resistance from the Mexican population, many of whom question how their data will be stored and used.

According to the announcement, prepaid phone lines that have not yet been linked to an identity will now have until between August and December to complete the process, with the deadline based on the last digit of the phone number. The new policy states that after the deadline expires, telephone companies will suspend service to non-compliant lines within 72 hours.

“For the safety of all, every telephone number must be registered in the name of one person, in order to eliminate the anonymity that has allowed crime such as fraud or extortion,” the press release reads. “With this measure, Mexico will cease to be one of the few countries that allowed the acquisition of a SIM card without identification, and will join the international practice currently in place in 166 countries.”

Calls for a deadline extension have increased in recent weeks, as many critics believe the government did not adequately prepare the public for the change. In late May, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim called for an extension because the process was “very complicated” and progressing slowly.

With the extension of the deadline, the Mexican government and telecom companies are hoping extra time is all that will be necessary to convince more than 50 million people to comply with the mandate. This may prove more challenging than they anticipated in a country well known for mistrust of official institutions.

The requirement to link a person’s ID with their phone line is a fairly new development in Mexico—one of the few places in the world where individuals could still purchase and use SIM cards in cellphones without registering a name or showing some form of identification. All of that changed in July 2025 when several new laws took effect that compel the population to register for a biometric program required to access many services, including phone and internet access. Phone users were originally instructed to register their phone line with their telecommunications provider before June 30, 2026, or face interruption of service. This would force businesses selling these services to check a customer’s CURP before purchase.

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Is Tesla About To Use Facial Recognition Before Activating Full Self-Driving

Tesla is reportedly preparing a series of updates, including one that would use a vehicle’s cabin camera to verify a driver’s identity before activating Full Self-Driving.

It sounds a bit dystopian, but this is likely the direction that connected smart-car brands are headed. As vehicles become more autonomous, automakers will increasingly need to verify who is behind the wheel before unlocking FSD functions.

The X account Tesla App Updates penned a new report outlining a series of changes possibly headed to the mobile app, including deeper FSD integration, more owner-facing controls, and expanded software monetization infrastructure.

What stood out to us is the possibility of a new FSD identity-verification layer tied to the cabin camera. If the system cannot verify that the driver matches an authorized profile, FSD could be blocked.

Here’s the full report:

Native Support for “Coastal Blue” Paint

Tesla has added support for a new paint color called Coastal Blue, currently exclusive to the base Model Y Rear-Wheel Drive built at Giga Berlin for the European market.

The strings COASTALBLUE, getCoastalblue, setCoastalblue, clearCoastalblue, and hasCoastalblue show that the app is being updated to properly render this color in its 3D vehicle models. The app can now dynamically load the correct material and shading when a vehicle with this paint code is detected, ensuring accurate representation on the home screen, climate menu, and widgets.

In-App Searchable Video Tutorials

Tesla is building a native, searchable video tutorial library directly into the mobile app. Users will have access to a dedicated tutorial hub (VideoTutorialContent and VideoSearchPanel) with a search bar (VideoSearchBar) that returns relevant results (VideoSearchResultItem). This allows owners to quickly find how-to videos for features like FSD, wiper blade replacement, or PIN to Drive without leaving the app.

Users can also pin important tutorials (setPinnedVideo, pinnedVideo) for quick access. These pinned videos are expected to sync across devices via mergePinnedVideos. The interface uses a clean card-based design (VideoListCard) with pagination (VIDEO_SEARCH_PAGE_SIZE) for better performance.

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No New Laws Required… Private Biometrics Are Building The Digital ID Prison

That “black pill moment” is arriving faster than many realize. Not primarily through sweeping new government mandates, but through private companies quietly normalizing biometric data collection under the banners of “security,” “fraud prevention,” and “child protection.” They are erecting the infrastructure for a world where you cannot easily participate in daily life, commerce, or even basic online access without surrendering your face, your license scan, or other biometrics. Once the systems exist and the data flows, laws can simply ratify what private actors have already made routine.

In a recent commentary “Digital ID Black Pill Moment”, I highlighted a sobering reality: 186 out of 198 countries already have digital ID systems in place. Only a shrinking handful of nations lack foundational national digital IDs. As I wrote, “the global push for digital IDs is far advanced, likely past the point of no return, aligning with the UN’s 2030 goal of universal legal identity and enabling a globalist digital currency system that could control access to everything.”

Facebook/Meta: Selfie or Stay Locked Out

Government mandates are not required to finish building the digital surveillance prison. Citizens are willingly submitting their biometrics to access social media sites. For example, I am no longer on Facebook. They banned me during the Covid era after I began sharing information about the true contents of the shots and alternative treatments. A friend just sent me a Facebook post and I could not view it without taking a selfie and sending it to FB. No way was I going to comply.

Try viewing certain Facebook posts or recovering a flagged account, and you may hit this wall. Users are increasingly prompted to submit a video selfie turning their head in different directions so the system can map facial geometry to “prove you’re a real person” or restore access. The company states it uses this to combat scams and compromised accounts, and claims the video is deleted after verification.

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8 Frightening Forecasts For The Future Of Fraud

Fraud is entering a new era. Businesses across North America expect fraud trends like biometric fraud, deepfake scams, and synthetic identities to become more common in 2026 as criminals adopt faster and more sophisticated tools.

This visualization, created by Visual Capitalist’s Julia Wendling, in partnership with Inigo for the Fraud in Data campaign’s sixth post, uses data from the Sumsub Fraud Report 2025 to explore the fraud trends businesses believe will shape the future of digital risk.

Biometric Fraud Could Become the Biggest Threat

Surveyed businesses expect biometric fraud to rise the most, with 67% predicting an increase. As companies rely more on facial recognition, voice authentication, and remote onboarding, fraudsters are finding new ways to exploit those systems.

Deepfake technology is already making identity verification harder. In the future, AI-generated videos, cloned voices, and stolen biometric data could make fraud attempts more convincing and more scalable than ever before.

Businesses also expect synthetic identity fraud to grow, with 56% anticipating a rise. Criminals are increasingly combining real and fake information to create identities that can bypass traditional fraud checks.

AI and Deepfakes Are Changing Fraud Trends

Businesses expect fraud attacks to become more automated in 2026. Around 44% predict increases in advanced AI-driven attacks, deepfake scams, and forged identity documents.

Another 33% expect AI-generated fake profiles to rise as fraudsters use generative AI tools to impersonate real users online. These scams could become faster to produce and harder to detect across financial services, ecommerce, and digital platforms.

As fraud tactics evolve, businesses may need to shift from reactive fraud prevention toward real-time risk monitoring powered by machine learning and behavioral analysis.

Data Breaches Will Continue to Fuel Identity Fraud

Data breaches are expected to remain a major source of fraud risk. About 33% of businesses anticipate more identity theft linked to stolen personal data.

Organized fraud networks are also expanding, according to 22% of respondents. As cybercriminal groups become more coordinated, fraud operations could become increasingly global and industrialized.

The Future of Fraud Trends

Companies that invest in adaptive verification systems, stronger cybersecurity, and understand the data around fraud prevention may be better positioned to respond to the next generation of threats.

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Canada’s Bill C-34 Would Require ID or Face Scan to Use Social Media

Canada’s long-anticipated and dreaded Bill C-34 arrived on June 10 with the usual fanfare about protecting children.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, tabled it.

Strip off the press release and what is left is a law that lets an appointed federal body order Canadians’ posts deleted across the country, decide which platforms can give an account to a 15-year-old, and tell AI chatbots to watch what you type.

It also bans Canadians under 16 from social media by charging the whole country for it, in the currency of everyone’s privacy.

The government calls it the Safe Social Media Act. Safe for whom is the question it would rather you not dwell on.

The law creates a Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Cabinet appoints its three to five members. The same body writes the rules, runs the inspections, hears the complaints, and hands out the fines, which is a regulator and a courtroom folded into one office that answers to no voter.

Everything hangs on a phrase the bill declines to nail down, “harmful content.” There are seven categories, among them “content used to bully a child” and “content that foments hatred.”

The drafters did take the trouble to say content is not hateful merely because it “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends,” which is more care than these laws usually take.

It also changes very little because the people drawing the line day to day are the platforms, working from rules the Commission can rewrite whenever it wants. The edge of what a Canadian is allowed to say can shift without anyone in Parliament casting a vote.

So here is how a deletion goes. A platform decides it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” your post is child sexual abuse material or an intimate image shared without consent.

From that moment it has 24 hours to make the post inaccessible to every person in Canada. Down first, explained afterward. You can file representations and request a reconsideration, and your words stay gone the entire time you are waiting. Or someone skips you altogether and reports the post to the Commission, which can order it made “permanently inaccessible.” No judge appears anywhere in that sequence.

The definitions get bigger the longer you look at them. “Intimate content communicated without consent” now reaches AI images “likely to be mistaken for” a real recording of a person.

As a ban on revenge porn; reasonable, depending on how it’s implemented. But as written, those same words also cover a tasteless deepfake of a sitting politician, and the person sorting one from the other works for the company that gets fined either way.

Companies do not agonize over that distinction. They delete and move on.

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ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor

Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.

In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. “Are you shitting me, man?” Dillon asked the arresting deputy. “I haven’t been out of Fort Myers in two years.” Further, he also said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Dillon posted bail and pleaded not guilty to enticing or luring a child—a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he was only arrested in the first place, and threatened with prosecution for a particularly heinous offense, because of shoddy police work.

The ACLU is now suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the lawsuit, the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn’t take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. “In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect’s face is partially shadowed and off-axis,” the lawsuit claims.

When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer’s grainy secondhand cell phone photos.

But there were other leads that police could have followed, to either bolster their case or point in another direction. For example, when he approached the girl, the suspect was picking up food that had been ordered ahead; this implies he had an online account, with contact information and a form of payment attached.

“These records could have been used to identify the actual person who placed the suspect’s order,” the lawsuit notes. “Upon information and belief, Jacksonville Beach PD personnel never requested or obtained mobile ordering records, payment data, or online account information from McDonald’s.”

Further, the McDonald’s manager recognized the assailant as a “regular customer”—likely precluding Dillon, who lived and worked on the other side of the state and did not frequently travel. Besides, at no point did investigators search footage for the suspect’s previous visits, either for higher quality images or transaction records. And once they settled on Dillon as a suspect, investigators could have gotten a warrant for his cell phone’s GPS data, showing whether or not he was at a fast food restaurant 300 miles away from his home on the night in question.

The lawsuit notes that when Dillon’s name came up, investigating officer Scott O’Connell queried the police database of license plate readers, which did not detect Dillon’s vehicles in Jacksonville Beach within the 48 hours surrounding the attempted abduction.

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South Africa Creates Biometric Population Register to Control Migration

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Sunday evening that his government will take major steps to crack down on illegal immigration, including the creation of an “Intelligent Population Register” that “contains biometric data for every person in the country.”

Ramaphosa said the population register would lay the foundation for a national Digital ID system, replacing the antiquated and fallible paperwork currently in place.

“The Department of Home Affairs will set a date after which the green ID books will not be recognized,” he said.

The green ID books have been standard identification in South Africa since 1986, replacing the apartheid-era population register. The books resemble passports with green covers that are embossed with South Africa’s coat of arms.

Much like a passport, the green book includes personal information such as date of birth, citizenship status, signatures, a photograph, and a 13-digit ID number that is meant to be permanently attached to each resident, similar to Social Security numbers in the United States. The South African ID number was designed to incorporate both the individual’s date of birth and special codes that would confirm the ID number was valid.

South Africa began phasing out the green books in 2013, replacing them with a “smart ID card” that includes a microchip with biometric data, but the green books were still accepted as valid identification until now.

Ramaphosa conceded that the outmoded green books have “enabled identity theft by undocumented immigrants and criminal syndicates,” while existing plans to phase them out by 2029 were not moving quickly enough to combat massive and rapidly-growing fraud.

Ramaphosa said his government will also “end the abuse of the Traffic Registration Number, which foreign nationals require to register or buy vehicles but which is being used as a form of identification.” He directed the South African Department of Transport to overhaul the vehicle registration process within three months.

The South African president acknowledged widespread corruption in his government’s home affairs ministry, with officials selling documents and helping criminal gangs exploit the immigration system. He promised a vigorous crackdown, including termination and criminal prosecution for corrupt officials.

Ramaphosa also vowed to hire another 10,000 inspectors to ensure that South African businesses are not illegally undercutting local wages by hiring undocumented migrants. He said quotas would be established for “employment of foreign nationals in any economic sector or occupational category.”

On Monday, Ramaphosa published an article in his weekly newsletter explaining that the new identification systems were an effort to address legitimate criticisms of South Africa’s loose border controls.

“We are responding to real concerns that communities have about the effects that unchecked illegal immigration has on jobs and economic opportunities,” he said.

Ramaphosa stressed that most foreigners living in South Africa were not criminals, and he cautioned against allowing criticism of migration issues to devolve into racial intolerance and violence. He asked the public to be patient while his administration works on solutions that would be consistent with the national constitution and the rule of law.

“The task of managing migration belongs to all of us,” he said.

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Facial recognition watchlist made permanent in Christchurch supermarkets after trial

A Christchurch supermarket trial of facial recognition technology has been made permanent and extended to another store after showing measurable safety improvements.

After a three-month trial, Foodstuffs South Island has decided to keep the technology at New World St Martins and Pak’nSave Papanui and Moorhouse, while expanding it to New World Stanmore.

The initiative, which ran from October 2025 to January 2026, was designed to identify and manage individuals with a history of serious and harmful behaviour in stores.

Foodstuffs South Island retail head Kent Mahon said the results gave the co-operative confidence that the system could be deployed carefully and responsibly.

“The focus has always been on reducing harm. The trial showed we can do that while keeping accuracy high and respecting customer privacy,” Mahon said.

The facial recognition system scans images of everyone entering participating stores and compares them with a watchlist of known offenders.

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“Dystopian” Police.AI Launches in UK Amid False Arrests

A new UK national center launches within days, promising to find suspects in minutes, except it costs £115 million ($155M) and occasionally arrests the wrong person.

Police.AI, the body charged with pushing dystopian artificial intelligence across all 43 forces in England and Wales, comes with a seductive sales pitch from its frontman. Catch your suspect in minutes. Turn a weeks-long manhunt into a coffee break.

Alex Murray, National Crime Agency director and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s first AI lead, wants facial recognition to do exactly that. The catch, and it is a fairly significant one, is that the technology keeps flagging innocent people.

Murray’s whole pitch is speed. “What took days, weeks, sometimes months can potentially take hours,” he said, describing AI tools that span CCTV analysis, searches of seized phones and the flagging of fake images.

He likes to point to a Bedfordshire fraud case where the software chewed through Romanian-language phone data from four suspects and produced guilty pleas. Notice the shape of the pattern, though. It is always a list of what the police get to do. The part where the rest of us get scanned, sorted and occasionally pulled off the street tends to fall off the slide.

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They’re All Ears: Apple’s Plan to Read Your Mind

We’ve handed over our location, our browsing history, our voice, our face, and our purchasing habits. In exchange, we’ve gotten convenience. Now Apple wants the one thing each of us might have thought was still ours—the electrical activity of our brain. And this time, they’re not even asking. What are we talking about here?

In January 2023, Apple quietly filed patent US20230225659A1 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The filing describes a wearable electronic device—an earbud—equipped with multiple electrodes embedded directly into the ear tip and housing. These electrodes aren’t for audio. They are not there to improve our sound quality. No indeed. Instead, they are there to read our brain—using the same EEG technology doctors use to monitor neurological activity in clinical settings. And because every ear canal is shaped differently, Apple’s patent describes a machine-learning model that figures out which electrode combinations work best for each person’s specific anatomy, then keeps refining that over time. The result is a read that is accurate, continuous, and tailored to each of us personally. The digital signal is then transmitted wirelessly to our phone—and, per the patent’s own language, to a server, where it can be stored as “historic data” accessible by “another person given permission.”

Read that sentence again.

What EEG Actually Reveals
This is not science fiction, and it is worth understanding what EEG data actually captures—because it is a lot more than Apple’s marketing department will ever tell you. Brain waves are not background noise. They are a direct readout of our inner life. The alpha, beta, delta, theta, and gamma frequencies each correspond to distinct mental states—relaxation, intense focus, deep sleep, creativity, active learning. Together they paint an individual portrait of our mind that is more revealing than anything we have ever typed into a search bar or whispered to a smart speaker. These frequencies, as Loyola University researchers have noted, are also the same signals measured in polygraph tests—the ones used to determine whether someone is lying. They can reveal our stress levels, our concentration, our emotional state, and potentially flag neurological conditions that have not yet been diagnosed. As one researcher at the Neurorights Foundation put it in a Science Friday interview, neural circuits in the brain create our thoughts, emotions, memories, decision-making, and our very sense of self.

Apple wants that data streaming off our ears into their servers.

Are There Any Upsides?
Fair is fair—applications for in-ear EEG technology are being floated, and it’s worth addressing them. As Neurofounders reports, startups like NextSense are already developing in-ear EEG devices to improve clinical sleep staging. Detecting seizure disorders from continuous passive monitoring is another possibility. Early signals for degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s may surface in EEG data years before symptoms appear. And researchers have argued that natural-environment EEG collection—on the couch, at work, during real life rather than inside a sterile lab—would produce more accurate data on attention and cognitive states than anything gathered under clinical conditions.

These applications sound compelling on the surface. But step back for a second. Americans are not sleeping poorly because they lack a brain-monitoring device. They are sleeping poorly because they are overprescribed, overstimulated, and undernourished—and the same medical system profiting from that reality is not exactly rushing to fix it. Handing our neural data to Apple is not a solution to a pharmaceutical-created problem. It is just a new layer of surveillance dressed up as fake wellness. The idea that we should surrender the electrical activity of our brains as the price of entry for better sleep tracking should raise more than a few eyebrows.

Who Gets the Data?
Here is where things get serious. A 2024 Neurorights Foundation report pulled back the curtain on 30 companies already selling consumer neurotechnology devices. What they found should stop you cold. Twenty-nine of the thirty companies claimed unlimited rights to their users’ neural data. Most had quietly written third-party data sharing directly into their terms—buried in the kind of legal language nobody reads until it’s too late. Fewer than half even encrypt the data or de-identify users. There is no federal law in the United States governing how neural data collected by consumer devices can be used or sold. A handful of states—Colorado, California, Illinois—have moved to address this, but protections remain patchwork at best.

As a published paper in PMC bluntly put it, bulk sales of neural data by tech giants to third parties may already be occurring with minimal accountability. Data brokers could soon be cataloging individual “brain fingerprints” on a mass scale—data as uniquely identifying as a fingerprint, and infinitely more revealing.

Apple has faced its own data breach history. As Pearl Cohen’s legal analysts note, the patent describes data transmission to external servers accessible by parties beyond the user. The company that couldn’t keep our FaceID data secure wants a continuous stream of our brain’s electrical activity.

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