Your Face as Business card

IBM announced a few years ago they no longer offer general purpose facial recognition or analysis software. The company will also no longer develop or research the technology. This decision of course is based on the possible abuse of the technology in case there is no proper regulation. In the EU we have such regulation: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR's primary aim is to give control to individuals over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU.

Within the EU everyone should be in charge of owning their own personal details and can organizations ask to delete the possible data and intelligence they might have about you and your (online) behavior. And on top of that, organizations should have agreed with customers storing their data upfront, before they even store any data or online behavior. A good starting point for a discussion on the use of facial recognition.

This technology can help improving any event entrance experience.

Recently my two sons were at a campsite with a beautiful outdoor swimming pool. To ensure only campsite guests could have access to the pool, they needed to upload a picture. This regular headshot was added to the profile of the camping spot and used to identify the swimmers when entering the pool. Cool!

Pretty sure this technology was created by 20face, a start-up company linked to the University of Twente in the Netherlands. They provide privacy proof biometrics solutions via their software. The biggest difference with other tools? They ask users to give consent to endpoints for recognition and manage the release of their personal data on a dashboard. So, if you don’t want your profile shared with any third party, just deactivate it in the app. Besides they only capture the biometrics, as a unique identifier. They never store it in combination with any personal data.

For festivals, conferences, soccer matches, trade shows or corporate events, they connect with a separate (event registration) database. Via an encrypted connection, the data is verified with a profile in the database and allows the event organizer to, for example, print on demand name badges. The 20face software is currently used by large stadiums like the Johan Cruijff Arena in Amsterdam, some health care organizations and companies involved in providing access control in office buildings.

We should really try to find a way to make this work. It will take some time, but the technology is ready, it’s up to the regulators so we can use our face as a business card.

Marc Bot is founder and CEO of Holon - providing event entrance technology and name badge printing solutions.