The idea dates back to when the social platform had its old, familiar Twitter name and is part of Elon Musk’s plan to turn Twitter (now X) into “the app for everything”.

“Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the updated policy reads.

Biometric data can be extracted from both the identity card and the image for matching purposes.

“This will additionally help us tie, for those that choose, an account to a real person by processing their government issued ID. This will also help X fight impersonation attempts and make the platform more secure”, X said in a statement, TechCrunch reported.

Although X hasn’t specified what it means by biometric information, it is usually used to describe a person’s physical characteristics, such as their face or fingerprints. X also hasn’t provided any details about how it plans to collect it.

Last month, ex. Twitter was named in a proposed class action alleging that the company improperly captured, stored and used Illinois residents’ biometric data, including facial scans, without consent.

“We may collect and use your personal information (such as your employment history, educational history, employment preferences, skills and abilities, job search activity and engagement, and so on) to recommend potential jobs for you, to share with potential employers when you apply for a job, to enable employers to find potential candidates, and to show you more relevant advertising,” the updated policy reads.

Perhaps this would largely reassure users and even make people like the idea of collecting this type of data. But is there something deeper behind this? It remains to be seen.

In the meantime, some interesting facts about biometrics:
Did you know that since ancient times, different nations have used biometrics for recognition and identification. In Babylon, China, Japan, Assyria, etc. fingerprints were used in making commercial transactions, marriage and other contracts.

And more…
The first attempt at a biometric relatively new identification system was created by Edward. Р. Henry and Francis Guilton included a fingerprint identification method, and the method itself was called – “fingerprint copy”. Interestingly, it was introduced first in India in 1876 and then in England in 1901, and within a few years was successfully integrated in almost all countries of the world.

The tech giant has revealed that the ability to lock Incognito sessions in Chrome behind biometric authentication on mobile devices is currently making its way to Android users after debuting on iOS. When this feature is turned on, users will have to confirm their identity via facial or fingerprint authentication every time they return to the Incognito tab after exiting Chrome or switching to another app.

With online risks on the rise, Chrome’s “privacy by design” approach means users can complete an online purchase, get work done or pay a bill with a little more peace of mind.

Built-in features like Google Password Manager make logging in safe across all devices and help detect compromised passwords. Along with providing strong default protections, the company makes privacy controls easy to find, understand, and use in Chrome. While many of these features are widely known, Chrome includes many privacy settings and security features that may be new to most users.

Locked Incognito sessions first became available on Android in 2022 – more than a year after Google began testing them for iPhone and iPad – but as an experimental feature that must be enabled via a flag.

Based on 9to5Google’s experience using it on Android last year, this feature will show a gray screen with the Incognito logo in the center when you return to a tab protected by the privacy feature. You’ll then need to tap “Unlock Incognito” to open biometric authentication or choose to verify your identity with a PIN.

Removing the need for annotation makes testing bias’s much more practical.
In recent years, the algorithm of this technology has become a central topic of research in various AI disciplines. Interest in the topic has grown following a 2018 study of biases in facial recognition software – where various errors were found in people from different demographic groups.

At this year’s European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), a new method for assessing bias in facial recognition systems was presented that does not require identity-annotated data. Although the method only estimates the performance of a model on data from different demographic groups, our experiments show that these estimates are accurate enough to detect performance differences that are indicative of bias.

This result – the ability to predict the relative performance of a face recognition model without test data with annotations indicating the identity of the face – was surprising and suggests an evaluation paradigm that should make it much more practical for face recognition software developers to test their models for bias.

Based on the hierarchical clustering of the test samples, we can compute error bounds for our accuracy estimates, and our experiments show that even accounting for error, our approach can still give a clear signal of inconsistency. This methodology will help artificial intelligence practitioners working on face recognition or similar biometric tasks to ensure the fairness of their models and make working with these types of programs even more error-free.

Here are 5 FinTech deals in September of the European region:

CaixaBank and Revelock

CaixaBank has worked together with the start-up Revelock, recently acquired by Feedzai, to develop a solution based on artificial intelligence to prevent fraud in digital banking channels. The partnership comes as part of CaixaBank’s wider strategy of collaboration with start-ups to identify key talent and accelerate innovation.

Through this partnership, CaixaBank is reinforcing its strategy of applying cutting-edge technology to digitize its processes, creating new financial services and fraud control. It is also progressing using biometrics in its security strategy, a technology that reinforces identification security while remaining transparent to the customer.

Paynetics and Thames Technology

Paynetics UK has chosen Thames Technology as its preferred card procurement service across the UK and Europe. They can now provide bespoke end-to-end card services to their customers. This FinTech collaboration will allow Paynetics to offer advantages on value, quality, and speed for its customers in the FinTech, corporate, and public sector markets.

Thames Technology has Visa, Mastercard, and UnionPay accreditation, making the company the perfect partner to deliver data security, high-quality manufacturing, and personalization for Paynetics customers.

TrueLayer and Cazoo

TrueLayer, Europe’s open banking platform, announced its industry-first collaboration with Cazoo, the UK’s online car retailer, makes buying or selling a car as seamless as ordering any other product online to offer instant payments and refunds for its customers.

Cazoo turned to market leader TrueLayer to overcome costly issues most commonly associated with traditional card payments. Increasingly, eCommerce retailers are experiencing high failure rates due to card payment limits, potential fraud and chargebacks, and slow refund mechanisms that can sour the customer experience.

Phoebus Software Limited and Webio

Phoebus Software Limited (PSL) has selected Webio to supply multi-channel customer social media communication for PSL’s clients. This enhances PSL’s overall offering to both new and existing clients. This FinTech partnership is the latest addition to the Phoebus Ecosystem Programme that pulls together best of breed suppliers across a range of non-core Phoebus services.

Webio is an award-winning provider of customer engagement solutions. The solution is particularly used in collections environments to use artificial intelligence to predict customer outcomes based on multi-channel communication. The integration will be achieved via the Phoebus API engine creating a full audit trail of customer activities.

Solarisbank and Feedzai

Solarisbank AG, Europe’s leading Banking-as-a-Service platform and Feedzai, the world’s leading cloud-based financial risk management platform, announced a multi-year partnership at Money20/20 Europe. The pioneering companies have joined forces to reshape banking, combining the trailblazing transformation of Banking-as-a-Service with the risk management and security expected from financial institutions while preserving the customer experience.

Solarisbank enables any company to offer financial services via APIs while easing the technical and regulatory complexities. With this new partnership, Solarisbank is leveraging Feedzai’s proprietary technology, enabling them to apply adequate risk management according to respective law requirements.