Question

4. Read three recent news articles about Biometrics and write a brief summary. Include a reference to each article.

Answer 1

1.Panasonic piloting facial recognition payments at a FamilyMart store in Japan

Panasonic, in partnership with Japanese convenience store chain FamilyMart, has started a pilot project of a facial recognition-based unmanned payment service at a next-generation convenience store in Yokohama, a city south of Tokyo, Nippon.com reports. The store has cameras and censors installed in the ceiling to monitor customers and products.

Using the latest Panasonic developed biometric and image analysis tech customers can register their photo and credit card information and then check out items using unmanned registers. Other labor-saving technology that has been deployed include an automated mobile staff notification system for out of stock products. According to FamilyMart president Takashi Sawada, technologies that can be practically used will be introduced at other stores as soon as possible.

The pilot project is located near a Panasonic plant and run by the Japanese electronics company under a franchise contract with FamilyMart. The unmanned payment system is available for Panasonic workers who register facial data and credit card information in advance.

Biometric industry stakeholders told Biometric Updatelast year that retailers need to offer incentives for consumer to accept retail deployments of facial recognition in developed markets.

Reference: www.biometricupdate.com

2.HSBC Uruguay Embraces FacePhi’s Biometric Authentication

FACEPHI is a global leader in Facial Recognition technology and in Mobile Biometrics technologies.FacePhi‘s upwards trajectory continues, with HSBC Uruguay becoming the latest financial services firm to embrace its selfie-based biometric authentication technology.

The new partnership marks FacePhi’s first foray into the Uruguayan market, though this isn’t the first time it has worked with the global bank. HSBC’s Argentinian startedtaking advantage of FacePhi’s technologyback in 2017; now, the Uruguayan expansion suggests the bank’s Argentinian team saw positive results from their experimentation with the now very popular selfie-based approach to authentication.

In announcing the new development, FacePhi asserted that it now counts over thirty financial institutions in its client roster, with its technology serving over 6 million users globally.

It also comes soon after the announcement that Spain’s CaixaBank had launched ATMs featuring FacePhi-powered facial recognition, a sign that FacePhi may be looking to further expand applications of its facial recognition technology – and further accelerate its ascent.

Reference: www.findbiometrics.com

3. Android is helping kill passwords on a billion devices

IT'S MORE IMPORTANT than ever tomanage your passwords online, and also harder to keep up with them. That's a bad combination. So the FIDO Alliance—a consortium that develops open source authentication standards—has pushed to expand its secure login protocols to makeseamless logins a reality. Now Android's on board, which means 1 billion devices can say goodbye to passwords in more digital services than seen before.

Google and the FIDO Alliance announced that Android has added certified support for the FIDO2 standard, meaning the vast majority of devices running Android 7 or later will now be able to handle password-less logins in mobile browsers like Chrome. Android already offered secure FIDO login options for mobile apps, where you authenticate using a phone's fingerprint scanner or with ahardware dongle like a YubiKey. But FIDO2 support will make it possible to use these easy authentication steps for web services in a mobile browser, instead of having the tedious task of typing in your password every time you want to log in to an account. Web developers can now design their sites to interact with Android's FIDO2 management infrastructure.

"Google got involved in FIDO quite some ways back, particularly because of phishing, which we think is one of the biggest issues of authentication on the web today," says Christiaan Brand, a product manager at Google focused on identity and security. "The natural evolution was looking toward FIDO2.

Developers can implement FIDO2 authentication in a number of different variations depending on what makes sense for their product, but all the versions offer additional phishing protection by requiring user participation during sign-in (like doing a fingerprint scan or producing a dongle) so attackers can't get as far with usernames and passwords alone.

FIDO2 and a related standard,WebAuthn, created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, have gained ubiquitythrough adoption by all the major browsers—except Safari, though Apple has hinted it will add support—and platforms like Microsoft account sign-in. But Android represents a big step, because it will enable a major subset of mobile developers to start offering universal password-less logins.

Reference: www.wired.com