Katarzyna – Biometriq

At the end of the year, Radio Lublin hosted an interesting program on network security. It covered, among others, issues related to digital identity, privacy and its protection, as well as the phenomenon of the rapidly growing amount of data on the Internet and the impact of this phenomenon on the development of tools, AI and the life of society. The conversation took place as part of the series “XX/XXI – a garden with forking paths”, and the participant of this inspiring conversation was Andrzej Tymecki, Managing Director of BiometrIQ. Below we share some selected statements that constitute a short summary of this meeting.

👉 The amount of data is growing incredibly fast. To illustrate the point, if we recorded the data produced in the world in one day onto DVDs and arranged them one by one, they would cover 106,000 km, which means their length would be enough to circle the Earth more than twice.

👉 The concept of privacy is constantly evolving as technology advances and new opportunities emerge. It is no longer just traditional personal data such as name, PESEL or address, but also photos and biometric features such as voice, finger touch, iris. This makes protecting privacy more and more difficult.

👉Nowadays, it is very easy to commit identity theft due to the advancement of technology and the development of AI. Protection against loss of privacy and identity theft forces caution when posting any content online.

👉The right to be forgotten, introduced into the GDPR Act in 2014, allows us to delete our data from the database.

👉Using advanced methods to protect recordings, e.g. using watermarks. may not be enough to protect against identity theft. What is needed is the good will of people on the other side (platform managers) who will verify the recordings in terms of their authenticity.

👉Procedures are a very important issue in ensuring safety. Procedures cannot be replaced by technology. Technology is supposed to support and facilitate their implementation.

👉 Data centers play a key role in terms of security, of which there are as many as 144 in Poland. The United States is undoubtedly a power in this respect, with approximately 5,300 facilities.

you can read about the program itself, as well as the entire series here

Voice payments? Why not! Nearly 50% of Poles would like to use innovative payment methods based on biometrics. Authorizing expenses by voice was indicated by 7% of Poles, by face by 8% and by iris of the eye by 9%. Payments using fingers and palms turned out to be the most popular, indicated by 20% of the respondents.

T This is according to the report “Payment references of Poles 2024” conducted this year (2024) by PolCard from Fiserv. You can read more about this study here

In our opinion, the use of biometric authorization will increase year by year, mainly due to its high effectiveness. Biometric security is simply safer than traditional ones such as passwords and is much more difficult to bypass. The main factors determining the development of biometric technologies will be:

👉 security
👉 privacy protection
👉 trust in technology and
👉 implementation costs

And You? Which method would you most like to use?

Have you ever wondered if your voice is part of your image?
If we assume that the image consists of physical features by which a person can be recognized (as stated in Wikipedia or the PWN dictionary), the voice is undoubtedly an important element of such identification.

In our opinion, the voice is not only an element of the image but also a unique biometric feature confirming identity.

What supports this fact?
Each person has a unique voice, composed of many distinct elements. Even though it may be similar to another person’s voice, its characteristics will make it unique. It allows for effective identification of the speaker not only thanks to color recognition but also biometric assessment. Using advanced biometric algorithms, we are able to determine with a very high, over 90 percent probability, whether a voice belongs to a given person and whether it is fake (generated by AI).

The language of biometrics is unfamiliar to most, even as the technology becomes ubiquitous.

People using biometric data do not necessarily know that it is “biometric data”.

A team of German researchers from the Bundeswehr University of Munich and the University of Duisburg-Essen conducted an online survey covering participants’ general understanding of physiological and behavioral biometrics and their perceived usefulness and security. Key research questions focused on literacy, perception and use, and usability and security.

Do people know what biometrics are?

What value do they see in using them?

What makes systems seem useful and secure?

The results show that although most participants were able to mention examples and claimed to use biometric technologies in their daily lives, they had difficulty with the definitions and description of biometric data. Only about 1/3 of participants gave specific examples of the use of biometrics such as fingerprints, facial recognition, ID cards and signatures.

more https://www.biometricupdate.com/202410/language-of-biometrics-is-unfamiliar-to-most-even-as-tech-becomes-ubiquitous

Today we celebrate 5 years! This is an important 5 years of experience in the field of voice biometrics, which resulted in the creation of new quality biometric solutions: an innovative VoiceToken authentication tool, which is currently covered by the EU patent procedure, and work on a voice communicator with unique functional properties that improve the safety and comfort of use, also for people with disabilities.

Because it is important to us to provide high-security solutions, we are constantly looking for new opportunities to collaborate with the best teams in the world. In 2022, we signed an agreement to implement modern biometric solutions with ID R&D from the USA, which gave us access to the biometric know-how of a major market giant.

We appreciate the annual funding from research institutions PARP and NCBiR, which proves how innovative and promising our projects are. This is nearly PLN 15 million received over these 5 years.

A big THANK YOU❤️ we installed on this day to our partners, customers and the entire BiometrIQ team for the reliability, device and heart left on the respective projects.

It is thanks to you that we are developing, creating a new, safe reality.

A few days ago, we launched a new version of the voice coherence demo, in which you can check whose voice among famous Polish athletes is closest to yours. Our list includes the names of such Olympians as Iga Świątek, Michał Kwiatkowski, Anita Włodarczyk and Hubert Hurkacz. In total, we selected as many as 20 people from 13 different disciplines.

How does the demo work?
To check who your voice is similar to, just visit the website https://demo.biometriq.pl:8443/ and read the text we have prepared, the reading time of which is only 30 seconds. During this time, we record a voice sample, which is simultaneously compared with the voices of selected 20 athletes. The results are displayed immediately in a column in the form of % convergence.

The result may show:
=> significant % convergence with only one person
=> show no convergence, then the table will remain unchanged and 0 will be shown everywhere
=> convergence with several people (this happens most often).

Remember that voices may be confusingly similar to each other, but not biometrically consistent. Conversely, they may be biometrically consistent but not audibly similar. This is because the human ear primarily perceives the intensity and tone of sound along with the location of its source, and biometric systems extract from the audio stream and analyze several features that make the analyzed voice unique.

What does biometric integrity testing give us and when is it helpful?

The algorithm used in this exercise may be used commercially in the future in systems for verifying the identity of people and detecting voice-based fraud, the so-called deepfakes. This model is constantly being developed and improved by us to be as effective and reliable as possible, which is associated with obtaining a probability of assessing the speaker’s truthfulness of over 90%.

From January 2024 We are implementing the Vesper project, which aims to create an innovative voice communicator. We informed about the project here https://biometriq.pl/en/vesper-save-voice-communication-platform-with-integration-of-biometric-services/

The aim of the first stage of the project, completed on December 31 this year, is to develop an innovative method for detecting the truthfulness of the speaker and the transmitting voice stream.
Implementing this method in the messenger will allow you to assess the compatibility of the interlocutor communicating, among others, smartphone or computer according to your expectations and prevent voice attacks.

And what we did?

1. We have developed the structure of the subsystem.

2. We have developed preliminary requirements for a methodology for detecting the veracity of the far-end voice source based on the received signal in the near-end device.

3. We have developed guidelines for measurement methodologies, taking into account the statistical significance of the results.
4. We have developed a preliminary version of research procedures taking into account the developed research scenarios for stage 1.

Scenarios and research procedures were developed taking into account the state of scientific knowledge at the time of work.

5. We have prepared a dataset for training neural networks.

6. We carried out the first training of neural networks and the selection and optimization of cost functions.
7. We performed a detailed analysis of QoE assessment methodologies in connection with qualitative objective parameters and proposed the framework of our own solution in this area.
8. We analyzed the possibilities of controlling and intervening in the audio path for mobile phones available on the market.
9. We have prepared and configured the first version of the VESPER test platform based on the Signal framework for Windows and Android.
10. We rented a DSP laboratory

11. We acquired a speech corpus for testing

12. We have purchased Voice Conversion engine licenses

Ideas for using the latest technologies may be surprising. Deadbots (also known as griefbots or postmortem avatars) have appeared on the market, i.e. replicas of deceased people communicating with their loved ones in their native language and in their own voices. These are applications or computer programs based on data obtained from the Internet, which are intended to create the illusion of a deceased person and provide emotional support after the death of loved ones.

And although the goal seems right, scientists from the University of Cambridge draw attention to the number of threats associated with this technology. Based on the three analyzed scenarios (selling products using the image of the deceased, parent avatar for a child, purchasing a long-term deadbot subscription for loved ones), the main ones are:

=> the possibility of manipulating and influencing people in mourning

=> using the image of people after death without their prior consent (need to regulate this aspect by obtaining consents to use, also regarding voice)

=> monetization of the experience of mourning and the desire to circumvent regulations for sales purposes by companies producing deadbots

=> unfavorable impact of technology on certain social groups, mainly children (indication of introducing an age limit for the use of this type of solutions)

According to Newseria, scientists do not completely reject this solution. They indicate the benefits:

=> public education, deadbot as an intergenerational exchange of stories and experiences (e.g. Holocaust survivors talk about their experiences)

=> source of income for families after the death of famous artists or journalists

Deadbots are another example indicating the need to implement legal regulations for services created based on AI. This would avoid infringements related to the use of their image and voice after their death.

What do you think about deadbots? Are you convinced by this type of services?

More here https://biznes.newseria.pl/news/deadboty-moga-byc,p262956223

The incident with Scarlett Johansson confirms the fact that the issue of legal regulations and effective tools is currently the highest priority in the context of preventing deepfaks, i.e. voice-based attacks. Illegal use of the voices of famous people to promote or discredit them is common and constitutes quite a challenge in the world of social media.

The dispute that Johansson is having with Open AI, which allegedly used her voice from the movie “Her” to create the GPT Chat assistant, is a perfect example here showing how easily a voice can be used and how difficult it is to prove that the voice belongs to a given person and not another person .

In short, Open AI, despite Johansson’s lack of consent to license her voice to create a chat voice assistant, GPT presented its voice-using product called “Sky”, confusingly similar to it.
The lack of legal protection in this area unfortunately does not work to the actress’s advantage. However, it clearly draws attention to the need to protect the creative work of artists to power artificial intelligence tools.

You can read about the use of S. Johansson’s voice in the original article

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/openai-pulls-ai-voice-that-was-compared-to-scarlett-johansson-in-the-movie-her

We’re talking about this for a reason. When it comes to anti-deepfake tools, BiometrIQ, as a research company, specializes in creating algorithms that help detect fraud by comparing real voices with those generated by AI. Using proprietary tools, we can assess with very high certainty whether a voice has been faked or not. Using a biometric-based algorithm is certainly the most effective way to combat deepfakes on the Internet.

We also have an algorithm that helps, already at the stage of creating recordings, mark them so that they cannot be effectively used for further conversion or voice synthesis. Such a tool would certainly help reduce voice theft cases.

It’s already happening. Age estimation using biometrics on point for UK sales solution articles. Is security responsible for solutions in Poland?

Innovative Technology (ITL) has confirmed the main authority’s partnership with Buckinghamshire & Surrey Trading Standards for the use of their biometric age assessment technology by retailers selling age-restricted goods.

ITL’s biometric age estimation products, MyCheckr and MyCheckr Mini, anonymously estimate age at the point of sale, thereby preventing minors from accessing alcohol and cigarettes.

https://www.biometricupdate.com/202402/global-demand-for-age-estimation-verification-drives-deals-for-itl-new-entrants