Biometrics at the Proof of safety. Uses and Regulations

Biometrics, which emerged in the 19th century, is an integral part of the technical developments of the 21st century. According to the Petit Robert, biometrics is "the science which studies, with the help of mathematics (statistics, probabilities), biological variations within a given group". In response to the question "What is biometrics?", Actronix began with an observation: there are three ways of identifying a person: possession (card, badge), knowledge (password) and biometrics. This observation led to a definition: "Biometrics enables a person to be identified on the basis of automatically recognizable and verifiable physiological or behavioral traits".

The industry classifies biometric systems into two categories: morphological or physiological biometrics, and behavioral biometrics. Morphological biometrics distinguishes fingerprints, hand shape, face shape, eye retina and iris, earlobe contour, lip contour, etc. Behavioral biometrics identifies certain behaviors of a physical person, such as signature tracing, voice print, gait, or the way a person types on a keyboard. Personal data regulatory authorities, such as France's CNIL, use these distinctions, to which they add blood analysis, odors and other elements, since biometrics research in the 21st century is well supported by companies, aided by software, with an excellent return on investment and a good false rejection and false acceptance rate.

Moreover, biometric data is also personal data, and sensitive data, since the General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in the European Union on May 25, 2018, and succeeded Directive 95/46 of October 24, 1995. The Data Protection Committee and national regulatory bodies must ensure that there is a principle of proportionality between the biometric technology chosen and the purpose pursued.

Biometric technologies, first developed in Europe and America, have now spread to all countries, particularly in Asia.

The initial purposes of biometric techniques were management (e.g. palm recognition for school canteens in the UK and France) and security. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the security purpose is predominant, as in the field of interception, essentially for geopolitical reasons.

The aim of this article is to determine how and why this security purpose is applied to travel documents, identity documents, banking applications and facial recognition.