Examination of Eye Biometrics

More complex and less secure than I thought.

Cybercriminals Eye Biometrics

By David Geer

Commissioned by CACM Staff, June 23, 2022

Biometric markers such as fingerprints, the irises of one's eyes, and individual's entire faces are increasingly popular for proving identity. If criminals can steal such biometric data, they can pose as users, potentially accessing your Intellectual Property, customer data, and financial assets.

"While criminal hackers can offer the stolen biometric data for sale online for huge sums, the goal is targeting specific networks to bring them down," says Jake Moore, global security adviser for ESET UK, an anti-malware company. Cybercriminals sell the data on the Dark Web, an uncharted part of the Internet where buyers and sellers reach sites via encrypted channels using TOR browsers.

Organizations go to the trouble of adding biometrics to other authentication factors such as the one-time passcodes (OTPs) that arrive on your smartphone because the data they protect is precious. A successful biometric hack combined with other compromised authentication factors almost certainly equate to massive losses for an enterprise.

"With persistent attacks comes continual entry," says Moore. Though cybercriminals often have to work to hack biometrics successfully, once they are in the system, significant disruption is likely; without the proper security procedures and continuity plans in place, it can take a long time for organizations to return to business as usual, Moore says.

You should store biometric data using encryption for data at rest, and transmit it using encryption for data in transit to mitigate the risk of compromise. Never use biometrics as your only factor of authentication.  

"As the world moves toward digitization and people and organizations widely adopt biometric systems, the risk of data breaches leaking sensitive biometric data to malicious hackers increases," says Marios Savvides, director of the CyLab Biometrics Center of Carnegie Mellon University's Security and Privacy Institute. "The criminals can then create exploits and replay attacks for the biometric data, which they can use to break into the system," Savvides concludes.

Cybercriminals utilize replay attacks, in which a video of the person with the biometric markers is replayed on an iPad in front of the biometric scanner, says Savvides. "Replay attacks can happen for any biometrics system, whether it's a system to access your computer, bank account, or critical infrastructure," Savvides says.

It is easy to understand common threats to biometric data. "Protecting biometric data is difficult. Organizations find it challenging to secure face, voice, and fingerprint data from criminal hackers who collect it at coffee shops using high-resolution cameras and high sample rate audio recorders in the smartphones in their pocket," explains Brett Seals, a senior industrial cybersecurity consultant for 1898 & co, a business consulting and services company.

The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra camera phone offers 108 megapixels (MP) resolution according to Digital Camera World, which is higher than what is available with most professional cameras. That's more than enough for cybercriminals who take videos of highly placed executives for replay to facial recognition systems. .... '

Biometric Security

 Considering uses and misuses

New Approaches to Biometric Security

By Jake Widman, Commissioned by CACM Staff, April 28, 2022

Businesses and organizations of all sorts need to restrict access—to systems, devices, accounts, places, and more—to only those people who should have it. The most common method for accomplishing this is to require each user have a password, sometimes backed up with a code they get on their phone or by answers to questions about something personal, like their first car

An increasingly common alternative is biometric security: identifying someone by some physiological feature of their body. Every body is unique, and one's body is always available, while passwords and security questions can be forgotten. Fingerprints and facial recognition have become mainstream forms of biometric security (although both of these methods have downsides, which create demand for other physiological approaches).

New biometric security methods place a priority on contactless identification (such as facial recognition), propelled by the pandemic and the public's increased reluctance to touch shared surfaces. According to a study by Canadian-Indian market research firm Precedence Research, the contactless biometrics technology market was valued at $6.95 billion worldwide in 2021, and is expected to reach over $37.10 billion by 2030. Another market research organization, UAE-based Fact.MR, sees an even larger market for biometric security solutions growing from $17.1 billion this year to $78.6 billion in 2032.

Current downsides

The use of fingerprints for identification may date back to Babylonian times, when it was used as a form of signature on clay tablets. Modern Americans use their fingerprints for everything from getting a driver's license to unlocking their smartphones. However, fingerprint sensors are far from foolproof, as it is vulnerable to measures as simple as using adhesive tape to lift a fingerprint from a surface and using it to fool security into unlocking.

Facial recognition dates to the 1960s, when a researcher at the Rand Corporation used a digital tablet to mark coordinates of facial features on a grid. By 2017, smartphone manufacturers were offering facial recognition as a way for users to unlock their phones.

However, "The pandemic taught us that face recognition does not work with masks on, and certain ethnic groups have more difficulty being accurately identified than others," says Chris Jahnke, senior vice president for Global Business Development at EyeLock, a company that provides iris-based authentication. "To get around masks these days, some companies are using only what is available to be seen—the area around the eyes—and this greatly reduces their accuracy because they are taking fewer data points into consideration."

Facial recognition also raises privacy issues. For one thing, it can be used to track people in public, as well as just unlocking their phones. Users feel proprietary about their appearance, too, and worry about data breaches: the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2021 started using facial recognition-based security to allow taxpayers access to their accounts, but taxpayers reportedly found the process frustrating and intrusive, so the IRS discontinued its use of facial recognition software. .... ' 

Amazon Gets more Biometric Capabilities,

 Interesting, don't consider this as ominous as is being implied here.  Scare quotes alerting you.   If it works to make people safer,  expect this to happen. 

In the Future, Amazon's Ring Doorbell Might Use Biometric Data to Surveil Neighborhoods

The company has been awarded patents for using smell and skin texture to identify a "suspicious" person.

By Florence Ion  12/16/21 8:15PM  in Gizmodo

I’ve always wondered when smell-o-vision would make its debut in the gadget world, but I didn’t imagine that Amazon would be the company to make it happen. Given that fact, you might not be surprised to learn that its actual implementation sounds a little problematic, to say the least.

The company filed patents that suggest detecting a person by smell is a future possibility for its doorbell cameras. But that’s not even the extent of it. The Ring doorbells could also scan to identify “suspicious” people based on their skin texture, the way they walk, and their voice. What could possibly go wrong?

The discovery comes from Insider, which looked through more than a dozen patents recently awarded to Amazon. They found that altogether, the patents outline a network of weirdly sophisticated surveillance that sounds not at all terrifying.

One Ring patent, filed and awarded in the U.S., is titled “Neighborhood Alert Mode.” At its core, it’s essentially community surveillance, with a dash of suburbanites-complaining-on-Nextdoor energy. Instead of your neighbor typing out a loaded post describing a person they deem to be a threat to the neighorhood—because what could go wrong there?—all they have to do is share a picture or video of someone they decide is suspicious to other Neighborhood users within the vicinity. Ring will then prompt other video doorbells within the network to start recording the so-called suspicious person, even if they don’t approach the front door. ...  ' 

More Biometric Doorbells

Expect more biometrics for security. 

In the Future, Amazon's Ring Doorbell Might Use Biometric Data to Surveil Neighborhoods

The company has been awarded patents for using smell and skin texture to identify a "suspicious" person.  By Florence Ion

I’ve always wondered when smell-o-vision would make its debut in the gadget world, but I didn’t imagine that Amazon would be the company to make it happen. Given that fact, you might not be surprised to learn that its actual implementation sounds a little problematic, to say the least.

The company filed patents that suggest detecting a person by smell is a future possibility for its doorbell cameras. But that’s not even the extent of it. The Ring doorbells could also scan to identify “suspicious” people based on their skin texture, the way they walk, and their voice. What could possibly go wrong?

The discovery comes from Insider, which looked through more than a dozen patents recently awarded to Amazon. They found that altogether, the patents outline a network of weirdly sophisticated surveillance that sounds not at all terrifying.

One Ring patent, filed and awarded in the U.S., is titled “Neighborhood Alert Mode.” At its core, it’s essentially community surveillance, with a dash of suburbanites-complaining-on-Nextdoor energy. Instead of your neighbor typing out a loaded post describing a person they deem to be a threat to the neighorhood—because what could go wrong there?—all they have to do is share a picture or video of someone they decide is suspicious to other Neighborhood users within the vicinity. Ring will then prompt other video doorbells within the network to start recording the so-called suspicious person, even if they don’t approach the front door.  .... . 

Detecting, Recognizing Voices at a Distance

Hmm, talk about loss of privacy.   Will this do it through a mask? Will we be wearing new kinds of 'voice' masks?  Note the training data.  Probably will be quickly restricted for use in the West.   But elsewhere?  

Biomimetic Resonant Acoustic Sensor Detecting Far-Distant Voices Accurately to Hit the Market

KAIST (South Korea), June 14, 2021  in CACM

Researchers at South Korea's Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed a bioinspired flexible piezoelectric acoustic sensor with a multi-resonant ultrathin piezoelectric membrane that acts like the basilar membrane of the human cochlea to achieve accurate and far-distant voice detection. The miniaturized sensor can be embedded into smartphones and artificial intelligence speakers for machine learning-based biometric authentication and voice processing. Compared to a MEMS condenser microphone, the researchers found the speaker identification error rate for their resonant mobile acoustic sensor was 56% lower after it experienced 150 training datasets, and 75% lower after 2,800 training datasets. ... ' 

China Based TikTok Says it Will Collect US Biometric Data

See also Bruce Schneier with further  comments on this.     

TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints     By Sarah Perez  in TechCrunch

A change to TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy  on Wednesday introduced a new section that says the social video app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content. This includes things like “faceprints and voiceprints,” the policy explained. Reached for comment, TikTok could not confirm what product developments necessitated the addition of biometric data to its list of disclosures about the information it automatically collects from users, but said it would ask for consent in the case such data collection practices began.

The biometric data collection details were introduced in the newly added section, “Image and Audio Information,” found under the heading of “Information we collect automatically” in the policy.

This is the part of TikTok’s Privacy Policy that lists the types of data the app gathers from users, which was already fairly extensive.

The first part of the new section explains that TikTok may collect information about the images and audio that are in users’ content, “such as identifying the objects and scenery that appear, the existence and location within an image of face and body features and attributes, the nature of the audio, and the text of the words spoken in your User Content.”

While that may sound creepy, other social networks do object recognition on images you upload to power accessibility features (like describing what’s in an Instagram photo, for example), as well as for ad targeting purposes. Identifying where a person and the scenery is can help with AR effects, while converting spoken words to text helps with features like TikTok’s automatic captions.  ... " 

More on Amazon's Palm Scanning System

Amazon Bringing Palm-Scanning Payment System to Whole Foods Stores

CNBC, Annie Palmer, April 21, 2021

Amazon's palm-scanning payment system will be rolled out to a Whole Foods store in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood before expanding to seven other Whole Foods stores in the area in the coming months. About a dozen Amazon physical stores already offer the Amazon One payment system, which allows shoppers who have linked a credit card to their palm print to pay for items by holding their palm over a scanning device. Amazon says the palm-scanning system is "highly secure" and more private than facial recognition and other biometric systems. The company says thousands of people have signed up to use the system at the Amazon stores.... '

Finger Vein Biometric Identification

Another biometric identification.  A kind of expansion of a much older method.   We also expanded iris vein ID methods.   Deep fake spoofing threat?

3D Biometric Authentication Based on Finger Veins Almost Impossible to Fool  By Optical Society of America 

A newly developed approach that uses three-dimensional images of finger veins could greatly increase the security of biometric authentication.

 State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) have developed a three-dimensional (3D) biometric authentication methodology based on finger veins that they say can improve the security of this type of authentication.

The protocol utilizes photoacoustic tomography, in which laser light directed onto the subject's finger generates a sound when it encounters a vein; an ultrasound detector captures the sound, and uses all the sounds generated to create a 3D image of the finger's veins.  Testing found the technique can correctly accept or reject an identity 99% of the time.

UB's Jun Xia said, "Since no two people have exactly the same 3D vein pattern, faking a vein biometric authentication would require creating an exact 3D replica of a person's finger veins, which is basically not possible."

From Optical Society of America   in the ACM.

Validating Clinical Usefulness of Wearable Tech

Ultimately measurement of value.

Verifying, Validating the Clinical Usefulness of Wearable Technology
By Duke University Pratt School of Engineering
May 28, 2020

Duke University assistant professor Jessilyn Dunn (right) watches as Dunn's Ph.d. student and co-author Brinnae Bent prepares to download information from a wearable health monitoring device.
An international team of biomedical engineers and researchers has created a framework for the assessment and documentation of the clinical usefulness of wearable computing devices.

An international team of biomedical engineers and researchers has created a framework to assess and document the clinical usefulness of wearable devices.

The proposed V3 framework would first verify the utility of Biometric Monitoring technologies (BioMeTs) by having hardware manufacturers test sample-level sensor outputs.

The next step, analytical validation, involves having engineers, data scientists, and physiologists evaluate algorithms that produce physiological metrics from sensor data.

The third and final step entails clinical validation, in which a technology vendor or clinical expert demonstrates that a BioMeT can acceptably identify, quantify, or predict the clinical, biological, physical, or functional experience it was intended to record, in the target population of users.

Duke's Will Wang said, "If such information is not clinically validated, users and researchers alike will be led to unjustified conclusions."

From Duke University Pratt School of Engineering .... "  (Full text available at link)

Fingerprint Cloning?

I recall  this came up when we set up our innovation labs.    Retails suggested it was much discussed at the time.  It was ultimately discounted because it was too hard to do.   Seems things have changed.  Via the Cisco blog 

Fingerprint cloning: Myth or reality?
Phone, computer fingerprint scanners can be defeated with 3-D printing
By Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Passwords are the traditional authentication methods for computers and networks. But passwords can be stolen. Biometric authentication seems the perfect solution for that problem. There are several kinds of biometric authentication, including retina scanning, facial recognition and fingerprint authentication, the most common one. Everyone's fingerprints are unique, and it is commonly accepted that they can identify a person without being reproduced.

Technological evolution expanded fingerprint authentication to all kinds of devices, from laptops to mobile phones, to padlocks and encrypted USB drives. Fingerprint authentication became commonly available on phones with the launch of Apple TouchID in the iPhone 5 in 2013. That technology was bypassed shortly after being released. Since then, the technology evolved into three main kinds of sensors: optic, capacitance and ultrasonic.

Our tests showed that — on average — we achieved an ~80 percent success rate while using the fake fingerprints, where the sensors were bypassed at least once. Reaching this success rate was difficult and tedious work. We found several obstacles and limitations related to scaling and material physical properties. Even so, this level of success rate means that we have a very high probability of unlocking any of the tested devices before it falls back into the pin unlocking. The results show fingerprints are good enough to protect the average person's privacy if they lose their phone. However, a person that is likely to be targeted by a well-funded and motivated actor should not use fingerprint authentication.  ... " 

Building Biometrics National IDs

Despite the pushback on some of these ideas, I think it inevitable that they will be widely implemented.  Identity is a key aspect of conversational understanding that leads to intelligent interaction.

Countries Debate Openness of Future National IDs
IEEE Spectrum
By Lucas Laursen

More than half of African countries are developing some form of biometric or digital national identification (ID) in response to major international calls to establish legal IDs for the nearly 1 billion people who currently lack them. However, this ID boom often moves faster than data protection laws. For countries that move forward with digital ID laws, opportunistic vendors can lock them into their products. For example, Kenya is using software that is only accessible to government agencies and contractors, a fact that is concerning to some critics. Meanwhile, India's Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) may not solve all the security issues associated with early national ID ecosystems, but it could empower governments to expect more from the vendors that support future national IDs. ...."

The Classic ID Badge Soon to Disappear?

Makes sense, but will probably be pushed back on if it uses facial recognition, and also based on how the scanned information is used, beyond just identification.  In our own study of security in a major government facility, that would be an obvious intrusion target, it was decided that ID badges should be made more colorful and obvious. So human guards could quickly scan for a first level of compliance.  Electronic scanning was rare at that time.  Now with advanced methods and biometrics, why not?

Office ID Badge About to Become Unrecognizable
The Wall Street Journal  in Catherine Stupp
January 6, 2020

Biometric identification systems, microchip implants, and devices that monitor employee behavior are beginning to replace traditional ID badges, with the potential to improve workplace security and navigability. Innovations like face and iris scans are harder to spoof than plastic ID cards, and companies can easily upgrade office cameras with facial-recognition technology. Facial recognition is especially popular at businesses with large workforces, but problems identifying people of color have prompted legislation to limit its usage. The U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity's Lars Ericson suggested smartphones could easily replace conventional IDs, with employees downloading apps to signal their arrival to office sensors, while phone-based motion sensors can record their daily movements and confirm their identity.  ... "

Palm Scanning Patent by Amazon

I recall we looked at this, as well as retina scans, for identification.     Less perception of invasion  perceived with palms, but also had some other issues.   Maintaining changes would be one issue.

Amazon wants to patent technology that could identify shoppers by their hands
The system could someday be used in Amazon Go or Whole Foods stores.

By Jason Del Rey@DelRey in Vox

Today, visitors to Amazon Go cashierless stores need to scan an app to get in. In the future, Amazon may instead ask to just scan their hands instead.

The US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Amazon on Thursday for a touchless scanning system that would identify people not by their faces but by characteristics associated with the palms of their hands, including wrinkles and veins. .....  "

Qualcomm Builds a Better Fingerprint Reader

Interesting out of Qualcomm.   The size is noted,  need to see it downsized.

Qualcomm builds a bigger, better in-screen fingerprint reader
Never miss your fingerprint scanner again with this giant new sensor.     By Ron Amadeo

In-screen fingerprint readers were the standard form of Android biometrics on 2019 flagships, and in 2020 we'll start seeing the second-generation versions of this technology. Qualcomm is hosting its big tech show this week, and one of the first announcements is the new version of its "3D Sonic Max" ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint sensor. The second-gen sensor is absolutely huge. Qualcomm says it's 17 times larger than the previous version.

In-screen fingerprint readers offer the benefit of being invisible and under the screen, and they can go on the front of the device while still allowing for an all-screen smartphone design. Being on the front lets you activate the fingerprint reader while the phone is on a desk, without picking it up. The downside is that there's not tactile guidance for where your finger should go. There's just a big, smooth pain of glass, and if you miss the fingerprint sensor, you're going to fail to unlock your phone. For in-screen fingerprint readers, bigger is better, since a wider target area means less of a chance you miss the invisible reader..... "

Micro Eye Movement Identification

We tested iris based identification.  Here another biometric approach I had not seen, which claims better accuracy:

DeepEyedentification: identifying people based on micro eye movements   by Ingrid Fadelli  in TechExplore

Past cognitive psychology research suggests that eye movements can differ substantially from one individual to another. Interestingly, these individual characteristics in eye movements have been found to be relatively stable over time and largely independent of what one is looking at. In other words, people present different patterns in the way they move their eyes and these unique 'eye movements' could be used as a means for identification.  ....  " 

EchoLocation as Biometric Activity Data

A reminder that any kind of data that results from interaction with its environment can be probed for pattern.   And thus provide learnable details.

This AI Uses Echo Location to Identify What You are Doing in Wired by Sophia Chen

GUO XINHUA WANTS to teach computers to echolocate. He and his colleagues have built a device, about the size of a thin laptop, that emits sound at frequencies 10 times higher than the shrillest note a piccolo can sustain. The pitches it produces are inaudible to the human ear. When Guo’s team aims the device at a person and fires an ultrasonic pitch, the gadget listens for the echo using its hundreds of embedded microphones. Then, employing artificial intelligence techniques, his team tries to decipher what the person is doing from the reflected sound alone.

The technology is still in its infancy, but they’ve achieved some promising initial results. Based at the Wuhan University of Technology, in China, Guo’s team has tested its microphone array on four different college students and found that they can identify whether the person is sitting, standing, walking, or falling, with complete accuracy, they report in a paper published today in Applied Physics Letters. While they still need to test that the technique works on more people, and that it can identify a broader range of behaviors, this demonstration hints at a new technology for surveilling human behavior. ... " 

Being Recognized Everywhere

Good piece about this   Another example of the implications of the inevitable.   Voice, not as often mentioned is also a dimension of this.

Being Recognized Everywhere   By Logan Kugler 
Communications of the ACM, February 2019, Vol. 62 No. 2, Pages 17-19
10.1145/3297803

hanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), society is now facing a unique challenge: how do we regulate the usage of human faces and voices?

Facial recognition is the ability of computer systems to identify and us by our faces. Voice recognition is the ability of computer systems to do the same for our words. Both are powered by AI, and both create benefits for consumers and citizens.

These technologies also raise difficult questions about privacy and personal rights.

Voice recognition powers popular consumer devices like Siri and Alexa, but it is also possible these devices are surreptitiously logging conversations and providing law enforcement with information on individuals.  ... "

FBI Trying Amazon Face Matching Software from Amazon

Inevitable that such measures will be used by law enforcement and governments.    Or it will only be being used by criminal organizations.  Bias and privacy will have to be considered.  What will the legal considerations for identification be?  Note the quantities of data being used.

The FBI is Trying Amazon’s Facial-Recognition Software in NextGov

The software allows the FBI to go through video surveillance footage much faster than agents can.

The FBI is piloting Amazon’s facial matching software—Amazon Rekognition—as a means to sift through mountains of video surveillance footage the agency routinely collects during investigations.

The pilot kicked off in early 2018 following a string of high-profile counterterrorism investigations that tested the limits of the FBI’s technological capabilities, according to FBI officials.

For example, in the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas carried out by Stephen Paddock, the law enforcement agency collected a petabyte worth of data, much of it video from cellphones and surveillance cameras.

“We had agents and analysts, eight per shift, working 24/7 for three weeks going through the video footage of everywhere Stephen Paddock was the month leading up to him coming and doing the shooting,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Christine Halvorsen.  .... " 

Determining if Superbowl Ads Behaviorally Compelling

During our neuromarketing experiments we analyzed how ads worked to influence people to buy.    Here ImmersionNeuro has new ideas on how they operate.  Check out their site for current ads.

Exclusive: Your brain is lying to you about Super Bowl ads.  in FastCompany  This neuroscientist can prove it   Immersion Neuroscience CEO Paul Zak on what measuring unconscious emotional response tells us about your brain that you can’t.
By Jeff Beer

The best commercial of the 2018 Super Bowl according to the almighty USA Today Ad Meter was Amazon’s “Alexa Loses Her Voice,” a hilarious look at what might happen if certain celebrities were given free reign to voice the digital assistant. The Ad Meter, which for many CMOs is the only measurement that counts, is based on public votes. You liked it. I liked it. We all liked it.
Or did we?

Paul Zak, PhD, cofounder and CEO of Immersion Neuroscience, says there’s a big difference between the Super Bowl commercials we say we love, and the ones our brains actually love, that we’ll remember, and will most likely lead us to actually buying the product.

Which is, uh, kind of the whole point.

According to Zak, the best performing ad of the 2018 Super Bowl was Diet Coke’s “Groove,” featuring a woman dancing after being happily possessed by the soda’s new mango flavor.

“Generally the ads that win have an emotional component, have a good story structure, but they don’t have to be likeable,” says Zak. “The Diet Coke ad isn’t really likeable, but it’s so weird you just want to know what this woman’s doing, you just can’t forget it. It’s bizarrely compelling.”   ..... "

Survey of the Use of Face Recognition in Business

Despite the issues, its in use and expanding, it is inevitable globally, net it will protect everyone, expect more.  Here an outline of uses.

The most exciting facial recognition use cases in business
By Steven Van Belleghem  in CustomerThink

Efficiency & the era of Pig Data

When a new or a matured software enters the market, it’s typically used to increase the speed and efficiency of certain processes. So it should not come as a surprise that organizations are looking into facial recognition to make them more effective, secure and to improve the quality of their products. This is not the cool or ‘sexy’ part where the customer experience is enhanced to nearly magical levels, but it’s where processes are sped up and made cheaper. In these continued price wars times, that’s a real competitive advantage.

Target, Walmart, and Lowe’s: they have all run trials of facial recognition technology. One of the most common applications of facial recognition here is catching shoplifters. FaceFirst – one of the more popular technologies amongst retailers – can scan a shopper’s face up to 50 to 100 feet away and it has reduced theft in stores by as much as 30 percent. The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) – the agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in charge of the security of travellers in the United States – began testing facial recognition technology for international travelers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) earlier last year and is planning to expand the use of biometrics technology. Even entertainers are starting to adopt the software for reasons of security. Taylor Swift, for instance, monitored a concert with a facial recognition system in California last year in order to record and recognize the faces of her too many stalkers. And the most obvious example of them all, of course: China’s very controversial social credit system which monitors and rewards, or punishes the behavior of its population, and ranks them based on their “social credit.”

One of the most advanced applications in the matter comes from China, too, where the e-commerce platform JD.com is using pig facial recognition to revolutionize farming. This type of projects can help reduce the cost of rearing pigs by as much as 50%, but it could also greatly enhance the quality of the meat, by monitoring how much which pig moves and eats. That’s a really nice case of Pig Data, if you ask me.  ....   '