The office of Texas State Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit against Google over the company's alleged years-long practices to capture and use of biometric data from, "millions of Texans without properly obtaining their informed consent to do so." This is allegedly a violation of the state's Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act of 2009. The AG argues that Google used features in its Photos and Assistant apps, as well as through Nest Hub Max hardware, to scan and store the facial and voice data without first acquiring user consent. Furthermore, Paxton alleges, Google then leveraged that data for commercial gain by using it to train the company's machine learning algorithms. "Google's indiscriminate collection of the personal information of Texans, including very sensitive information like biometric identifiers, will not be tolerated," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in the Thursday press release.

Researchers in the UK have developed a machine learning biometric system capable of identifying individuals from the shape of their hands. The intent of the work is to aide in identifying offenders, particularly in cases of sexual offenders that have recorded their crimes, where hand information is often the only biometric signal available. The paper, entitled Hand-based Person Identification Using Global and Part-aware Deep Feature Representation Learning, and proposes a new ML framework called Global and Part-Aware Network (GPA-Net). In GPA-Net, two distinct 3D tensors (global and local) are obtained by passing the source image through stacked convolutional layers on the ResNet50 backbone network. Each of the analytical avenues will make an identity prediction.

Some of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley want to scan your eyeball. You almost certainly shouldn't let them. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffmann, and major venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz are all backing a recently revealed plan by a company called Worldcoin, which mashes up three big ideas: It's a cryptocurrency company, and it's a Universal Basic Income project, and also it's a biometric-scanning company. If, first, the world will share its irises. According to a recent report by Bloomberg, Worldcoin's goal is to use cryptocurrency as way to spread money more equitably around the world in a setup similar to a universal basic income.

Combining biometric identification with artificial intelligence (AI) enables banks to take a new approach to verifying the digital identity of their prospects and customers. Biometrics is the process by which a person's unique physical and personal traits are detected and recorded by an electronic device or system as a means of confirm identity. Biometric identifiers are unique to individuals, so they are more reliable in confirming identity than token and knowledge-based methods, such as identity cards and passwords. Biometric identifiers are often categorized as physiological identifiers that are related to a person's physicality and include fingerprint recognition, hand geometry, odor/scent, iris scans, DNA, palmprint, and facial recognition. But how do you ensure the effectiveness of identifying a customer when they are not physically in the presence of the bank employee?