After a two-month pilot of using palm scans to pay for cafeteria lunches, Carroll County, Md. schools have scrapped the program, reports the Baltimore Sun. The program was tested in ten schools to speed up transactions and give children more time to eat, but parental concerns over children’s privacy led to the demise of the […]

Beginning Dec. 17, Australia will require visa applicants in Cambodia to provide biometrics along with their applications. Cambodians wishing to travel to Australia will need to submit their visa application in person at the Australian Embassy in Phnom Penh and provide two forms of biometrics: a facial image and a 10-digit fingerprint scan. These biometrics […]

A proposal by Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, to fingerprint all its faculty has met with considerable resistance. Since early November, the university’s faculty senate has voted twice by a huge majority to reject fingerprinting for each of the school’s some 1,100 employees. “I have no problem with a background check – I have […]

California-based voice biometrics provider VoiceVault announced that a large American cable provider is using its voice biometric identity verification product to authenticate over 60,000 customer service calls a month. VoiceVault’s product allows customers to bypass verifying account information through an agent in order to add or change services or order a pay-per-view show. They can […]

NexID is a spinoff from West Virginia University and Clarkson University that develops technology to determine if a fingerprint image is from a live finger or a spoof. Both optical and capacitive fingerprint readers are suspect to spoofing, but NexID’s software algorithms can be used to train these scanners to recognize spoofs, explains Mark Cornett, […]

The Canadian government is now requiring nationals of 29 countries and one territory to provide fingerprints and a photograph in order to enter Canada to visit, study or work, under regulations proposed by Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney. The Canadian government wants to collect biometric information to ensure travel to Canada is legitimate. […]

New privacy legislation in Australia has lifted the ban on police and spy agencies getting access to biometric facial scans taken for passports, drivers licenses or entry to nightclubs, reports the Herald Sun. Police departments will now be able to ask private companies to turn over any facial scans they possess. The idea is to […]

The MIT Technology Review reports that researchers have found a way to overcome the traditional limitations of voice biometrics as a reliable method of authentication. RC Johnson and some fellow researchers from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs say that when using a voice template, a more reliable authentication system is created. In this […]