The Brazilian Data at Risk in the Age of AI?
It addresses data security and privacy risks for Brazilian citizens in the context of government adoption of biometric systems, highlighting an incremental analysis of known vulnerabilities.
This work exposes vulnerabilities in biometric recognition systems, particularly face recognition, by demonstrating how they can be fooled using a known morphing attack, and presents a list of ten concerns to initiate discussion on data security and privacy in the AI era.
Advances in image processing and analysis as well as machine learning techniques have contributed to the use of biometric recognition systems in daily people tasks. These tasks range from simple access to mobile devices to tagging friends in photos shared on social networks and complex financial operations on self-service devices for banking transactions. In China, the use of these systems goes beyond personal use becoming a country's government policy with the objective of monitoring the behavior of its population. On July 05th 2021, the Brazilian government announced acquisition of a biometric recognition system to be used nationwide. In the opposite direction to China, Europe and some American cities have already started the discussion about the legality of using biometric systems in public places, even banning this practice in their territory. In order to open a deeper discussion about the risks and legality of using these systems, this work exposes the vulnerabilities of biometric recognition systems, focusing its efforts on the face modality. Furthermore, it shows how it is possible to fool a biometric system through a well-known presentation attack approach in the literature called morphing. Finally, a list of ten concerns was created to start the discussion about the security of citizen data and data privacy law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI).