Tag: biometrics

Controversial Eyeball-Scanning Worldcoin To Allow Governments To Use Its Digital ID System

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Worldcoin is a good example of private companies doing their bit to push and introduce digital ID schemes to as many people as possible – although this effort is usually done by governments, and supported by various lobbies.

And now, Worldcoin has announced that it will be even more helpful to governments, by allowing them to use the system of biometric scanning it employs to sign users up. Other companies will be given the same privilege.

The intention is clearly to get as many people as possible on board, hence the “generosity” with sharing the iris scanning tech, as well as that designed to verify people’s identity.

And it’s no secret: “We are on this mission of building the biggest financial and identity community that we can,” is how Tools for Humanity (a company behind Worldcoin) executive Ricardo Macieira put it.

The mission marches on despite concerns not only from privacy focused non-profits and advocates, but also institutions in various countries that are tasked with protecting data privacy.

People – and the number mentioned in reports these days is 2.2 million so far – sign up to Worldcoin by giving up biometric data contained in their eyes, i.e., irises.

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Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

Worldcoin — a new financial system connected to sensitive biometric information, mostly harvested from poor people — sure sounds like a terrible idea.

“Terrible” doesn’t do it justice.

Worldcoin will need to assemble a vast database of iris data. But not everyone is eager to gaze into an Orb. In the bootstrapping phase, at least, you had to pay people to scan their eyes. And so Worldcoin turned to the global south — home to the cheapest eyeballs — and played a dark game of ‘what will people do for money?’

Incredibly, Worldcoin was unprepared for an obvious consequence of this rollout strategy: A black market for verified credentials. You can now seemingly buy a World ID for as little as $30. Anyone, then, with more than $30 on hand can command more than one digital identity (although Worldcoin is aware of this issue and has proposed solutions to resolve it). Connecting real people to digital identities is a thorny puzzle. 

Worldcoin does not fix this. And it’s unlikely it ever can, since nothing in the design can stop professional sybil attackers farming eyeballs on the ground level through nefarious means.

This does not inspire trust in the system or its designers. And yet trust is what they demand. Worldcoin’s promotional materials are full of promises — to delete sensitive biometric information, or keep it hidden from view, or not use it in nefarious ways. One blog post (quoted here; the original appears to have been changed since initial release) put it this way: “During our field-testing phase, we are collecting and securely storing more data than we will upon its completion… We will delete all the biometric data we have collected during field testing once our algorithms are fully-trained.”

“Trust us,” in other words. “We’ll totally delete the eyeball database.”

But when it comes to sensitive information, promises aren’t enough. And the very people who insist that you trust them are the ones who should command the most suspicion. The fact that Worldcoin’s co-founder Sam Altman also heads up OpenAI — a firm currently being sued over allegations of dubious uses of large data sets — asks more questions than it answers.

Sometimes Worldcoin’s privacy promises are conjoined with dazzling technical details. Zero-knowledge proofs, we’re told, will save the day, and allow users to prove humanity without connecting any particular financial activity to a World ID or other associated transactions.

There’s a grain of truth here. Zero-knowledge proofs can generate impressive privacy guarantees. But in the case of Worldcoin marketing, they’re more theater than substance. Taking off your shoes at the airport makes it look like important precautions are being taken (but doesn’t actually make you any safer); and long blog posts about zero-knowledge proofs distract from, but don’t in fact address, the problem of Worldcoin asking for users’ trust.

Linking immutable biometric traits to money could have dystopian consequences.

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PhD Student Uses Deepfake to Pass Popular Voice Authentication and Spoof Detection System

University of Waterloo (UW) cybersecurity PhD student Andre Kassis published his findings after being granted access to an account protected with biometrics using deepfake AI-generated audio recordings.

A hacker can create a deepfake voice with five minutes of the target’s recorded voice, which can be taken from public posts on social media, the research shows. GitHub’s open source AI software can create deepfake audio that can surpass voice authentication.

He used the deepfake to expose a weakness in the Amazon Connect voice authentication system, a UW release reveals. Four-second attacks on Connect had a 10 percent success rate, and attacks closer to 30 seconds were successful 40 percent of the time.

In response, the company added biometric anti-spoofing software that could find digital markers on a voice recording, revealing if it was made by a machine or human. This worked until Kassis used free software to remove the digital markers from his deepfakes.

His method can bypass less sophisticated voice biometric authentication systems with a 99 percent success rate after six tries, according to the announcement.

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CEO of Worldcoin Says “Something Like World ID Will Eventually Exist…Whether You Like It Or Not”

Right now, it’s about those who voluntarily surrender their biometric data and receive “small sums” in Worldcoin in return for signing up to the World ID scheme.

But if Open AI CEO Sam Altman has anything to say about how Worldcoin, a project within his company, develops – everyone who wants to use the internet will eventually be required to use World ID – or “something like it.”

And right now, it seems that people in several southern European countries, notably Spain and Portugal, are simply itching to give away their iris biometrics as proof of identity and right to a cryptocurrency transfer wallet.

The signup process involves exposing your eyes to what’s known as Worldcoin’s Orb iris scanners. If reports are to be believed, the uptake in Spain, where the scheme first became available a year ago, is better than elsewhere – 150,000 participants in total, 20,000 new ones each day, and Barcelona is the place where a number of Orb scanners will be installed.

Portugal is not far behind, with 120,000 participants, and Germany is said to also be warming up to the project, ever since it started expanding two months ago.

All in all, some 2 million “biometric credentials” are now operated by Worldcoin. Why do people sign up for it?

“Something like World ID will eventually exist, meaning that you will need to verify [you are human] on the internet, whether you like it or not,” Blania said.

“Whether you like it or not” are the “sweet” words everyone does (not) like to hear in connections with something like that, but that is what Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania decided to go for when describing the future.

In it, according to Blania, digital ID will be so prevalent that it will become inevitable, and there will be no escaping verifying the quality of being human (and likely, quite a few more things) online – if one wants to be online at all.

And whether one “likes it or not.” Blania links it to “progress” in “AI,” and predicts this will be happening as soon as within a couple of years.

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Portland Goes Full China: Store Requires Looking at Camera to Enter

A convenience store in Portland, Oregon has implemented a digital face scan system that requires customers look at a camera before they are able to enter.

“Please look at the camera for entry,” a computerized voice says.

“Facial recognition in use,” the sign under the camera reads.

China has hundreds facial recognition stores.

It’s convenient to pay for your purchase with just your face, until your social credit score doesn’t permit you to enter the store.https://t.co/aTYt8eXuus pic.twitter.com/5FyxsZcR07

— Songpinganq (@songpinganq) July 10, 2023

The door remains locked until the customer consents and looks up at the camera.

Social media users have reacted to the development by drawing comparisons to China, which regularly requires citizens use facial recognition technology to access society. In communist China, citizens need to scan their face to buy products, and their social-credit scores get adjusted accordingly.

But with the democrat-run Portland having some of the highest crime rates in the United States, some stores have turned to the technology to save their businesses.

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Worldcoin May Have a Biometric Data Black Market Problem

Worldcoin, the digital identity and financial services crypto project that verifies people by scanning their irises, has found itself amid controversy after reports alleging that fraudsters are buying iris scans from the black market to register on the platform.

The project, which is headed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is currently preparing to launch and has been registering users across the world with the help of its physical imaging device called the Orb. The project aims to give everyone on the planet some of its Worldcoin crypto token after registration while their accounts are anonymized.

The lure of free crypto that may be exchanged for real money in the future seems to have been too strong for some people. According to Chinese blockchain-focused outlet Blockbeat, fraudsters have been offering iris scans from Know Your Customer (KYC) merchants in Cambodia for less than $30. Other iris scan may come from African countries such as Kenya.

Blockbeat did not clarify whether the back market iris scans were genuine or whether they were successfully used for registration for Worldcoin.

In response to Gizmodo, Worldcoin said that the platform did not have an issue with iris scans on the black market but it did detect several hundred cases of fraud involving its digital passport World ID, the verification protocol used to determine real identities. The World IDs are being sent to a third-party World app on the black market. The company claims it has taken steps to increase security and create a new recovery process for users’ World ID.

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Consumer Group Warns Smartphone Facial Recognition Apps Are Vulnerable to Spoofing

Smartphone face biometrics from many leading brands are vulnerable to spoof attacks with 2D photographs, according to a new report from UK-based consumer testing and review group Which?, according to Yahoo Finance UK.

The group says the vulnerability is “unacceptable,” and has “worrying implications” for user’s security.

On-device biometrics are used for device unlocking and local authentication, while KYC processes for customer onboarding and strong remote identity verification is typically carried out with server-side biometrics and other signals, with a layer of liveness or presentation attack detection.

The phones tested include Honor, Motorola, Nokia, Oppo, Samsung, Vivo and Xiaomi handsets. Apple’s 3D FaceID biometrics were not fooled by the photos. The devices tested range in price from £89.99 to nearly £1,000 (approximately US$112 to $1,244), but the majority of phones that failed the test are lower-cost or mid-range models.

Out of 48 new smartphone models tested, 60 percent were not vulnerable to spoofing with a photograph.

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Facial Recognition Shows Up in Public Housing, Small Cities

The race to make biometric surveillance commonplace is only getting faster, with systems going up in public housing and municipalities far from city crime.

With the growth comes a mission that residents worldwide have often been told is off the table, that of the all-seeing, always analyzing sentinel that never stops recording what happens in the community.

The issue is again in the news, this time following a lengthy article in The Washington Post reporting on facial recognition systems being used in United States public housing.

Also, Context, a Thomson Reuters Foundation analytical publication, has shown how surveillance vendors are selling smaller cities on big-city facial recognition systems – and how residents are being cajoled into linking their own cameras to police networks.

Post reporters said they found six public housing centers whose boards have purchased surveillance cameras and computer servers. Some of those on the list also use biometric surveillance algorithms.

They were the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing, Omaha Housing, Scott County (Virginia) Redevelopment & Housing, Jefferson County (Ohio) Housing and Grand Rapids (Michigan) Housing agencies.

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First Smart Gun With Fingerprint Unlocking Hits The Market

The first so-called “smart gun” that uses biometrics to unlock for shooting will hit the market at the end of the year.

Biofire Technologies announced this month that it is taking pre-orders for its home defense gun that is intended to prevent unwanted access to children and criminals. This is either a big step forward in gun safety or a gimmick with unreliable technology, depending on who you ask.

Smart guns, otherwise known as personalized handguns, have been in development for many years. The CEO and Founder of Biofire Technologies, Kai Kloepfer, told The Epoch Times in an interview that this is the first “major innovation in how a handgun has been designed or manufactured in 50 years.”

Kloepfer, 26, has been working on designing a smart gun since he was a teenager. “This is a new option for gun owners to give them peace of mind that their children or criminals won’t get their hands on it.”

The Biofire Smart Gun is a handgun that can be stored with fingerprints and 3D facial recognition to unlock it to shoot. The company says unlocking works in the dark. The data is stored in the gun in encrypted form. The gun can have biometrics for up to five total authorized users.

The Biofire gun has integrated infrared sensors in the grip to keep it armed while the user is holding it. As soon as the grip is released, the gun locks. It is powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that Biofire says lasts several months with average use and can fire continuously for several hours. The firearm only comes in 9mm caliber, but buyers are given multiple choices for color and style and left- or right-handed

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Colorado school district to introduce biometric scans of kids for free school meal access

The Poudre School District, in Colorado, will be piloting a controversial biometrics program to make the distribution of free lunches more “efficient.”

The pilot program will launch by May 25, 2023 in elementary, middle, and high schools, if it doesn’t go contested.

According to the school district, the biometric scans would take around two seconds. The program will use identiMetrics scanners, which will replace the current system where students have to enter their ID number on a keyboard to access their free school meal.

The fingerprints will be stored locally by the school district.

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