Industry push for balanced regulation of biometrics continues at UK policy conference

Companies selling biometric technologies should be required to provide documentation explaining their capabilities and limitations in plain terms, enable third-party testing and ensure meaningful human review is built into their application, according to Microsoft UK Director of Corporate, External and Legal Affairs Hugh Milward.

Milward was speaking as part of a panel at the Westminster eForum policy conference, and bobsguide reports market participants are urging regulators and lawmakers to impose rules on biometrics such as face and voice recognition.

The technology is developing fast, and laws need to be in place to protect individuals, according to Milward.

“Some of these issues are contained within [the General Data Protection Regulation] (GDPR) – most are not – but we believe there is tremendous value in bringing these together into a single place, into a single clear set of laws that people can scrutinise. We believe that companies like ours need to take action now before the law catches up,” he said, according to bobsguide.

Big Brother Watch Director Silkie Carlo expressed concern that there seem to be more industry representatives than democratically elected ones participating in policy discussions.

The use of biometrics in financial services belongs in a different category from public deployments of the technology, as iProov CEO and Founder Andrew Bud pointed out during a panel on the UK’s commercial biometrics sector later in the day.

Article Topics

Big Brother Watch  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  iProov  |  Microsoft  |  regulation  |  voice biometrics  |  voice recognition