General Intelligence
A Single Company Will Now Operate Facial Recognition for Nearly 800 Million People
Idemia just scored a major new contract with the EU
Welcome to General Intelligence, OneZero’s weekly dive into the A.I. news and research that matters.
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 400 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…
