Director of ZwillGen’s AI Division Brenda Leong contributed an article to a new report from the Biometrics Institute titled Concepts and Solutions: Keeping Biometrics Real. The report explores how policymakers, technologists, and regulators can better navigate the evolving relationship between digital identity, biometrics, and physical authenticity.
In her contribution, All People May Be Created Equal; All Biometrics Are Not, Leong examines the critical distinction between biometric verification (1:1 matching) and biometric identification (1:N matching) and argues that these fundamentally different uses of biometric systems carry significantly different risks and policy implications. She highlights how conflating the two can lead to regulatory approaches that either over-regulate benign authentication uses or under-regulate large-scale surveillance systems.
Leong also discusses how identification systems — particularly those deployed in public spaces — raise broader civil liberties concerns, including the potential for false matches, unequal error rates across demographic groups, and the societal impact of pervasive biometric surveillance. Her article calls for policymakers to move beyond regulating biometrics based solely on the underlying data type and instead focus on how biometric systems are used and the scale at which they operate.
The full report is available from the Biometrics Institute, with Brenda’s article appearing on page 77.