Idemia: facial recognition gatekeeper for much of the world
By:
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
22 June 2020 (Paris, France) – Last week we ran a story on the sprawling world-wide facial recognition industrial complex. Increasingly, individuals around the world are being recorded, identified, and tracked by companies that remain in the shadows. We left off one bit because it deserves a full post. Idemia, a French company specializing in facial, fingerprint, and iris recognition, just scored a new contract with the European Union that will include processing images attached to more than 450 million people’s identities. The company’s algorithms will verify the identity of EU residents who were born elsewhere and work for non-EU companies as they enter from external borders.
Idemia doesn’t have direct access to this data as an organization, and these aren’t contracts for live facial recognition for the surveillance of borders. But the company’s algorithms have now become the technology that decides if a person is allowed into much of the Western world.
In the United States, Idemia already has contracts with the U.S. Department of State to manage its enormous passport database, in which data on more than 360 million people is stored in Idemia’s proprietary format. Add up those contracts and Idemia will control whether nearly 800 million people are allowed to enter the United States, European Union, and Australia.
The new EU initiative is called the Shared Biometric Matching System, and it will eventually be linked to existing databases in the EU, including the Visa Information System and Entry/Exit System (EES). Idemia operates the Visa Information System, which helps determine which non-EU citizens can enter the Schengen Area, and held more than 50 million face images and fingerprints as of 2018.
The 400 million people cataloged in the new Shared Biometric Matching system will be third-country nationals, or people who aren’t from the EU who work for companies that are also not based in the EU. This would include, for instance, a Google employee working in the EU who is technically a citizen of Egypt. Idemia also runs much of the TSA PreCheck, which more than 9 million Americans utilize, and it is one of the facial recognition companies used by the New York Police Department.
It’s hard to understate Idemia’s global reach. The company runs facial recognition for anyone applying for a visa or citizenship in Australia, has partnered with Chilean telecom Movistar so customers can pay in stores with facial recognition, and tests its products in airports around the world, including in Singapore and France.
Ah, and Idemia also sells live facial recognition, called Augmented Vision, which can be used to pick people out of a crowd in CCTV footage.
All of this is to say that Idemia is a company we’ll keep an eye on. Even though travel has been greatly restricted due to the coronavirus, Idemia is a gatekeeper for much of the world and deserves scrutiny as such.
