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Fingerprints and facial images stored on a chip have been obligatory for EU ID cards since June 2019, yet biometrics for matters such as payments, entry to public venues and workplaces, and travel – which link to form a far more intrusive and centralised identity system – are now being promoted as the only way to return to normal amid COVID-19.
Governments and companies, while claiming that they will be optional, are threatening those who opt out with exclusion from the most fundamental of freedoms, which equates to outright coercion into a system that gravely threatens privacy and personal autonomy.
EU invests big in biometrics
The EU’s Horizon 2020 programme has been boosting the biometric industry since long before the coronavirus, particularly for security products for police and border control agencies, providing €1.7 billion in funding between 2014 and 2020 which involves wide ranging surveillance technologies such as facial and iris recognition, and a further €1.3 billion will be provided for the next seven years.
Figures compiled by the Guardian show that Horizon 2020 has given out €1.15 billion to private companies since 2007, which equates to 42 percent of the total €2.7 billion in funding from the security research programme, while it has also been the lead partner in almost half of the 714 funded projects.
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Among its beneficiaries is Idemia, a French tech company, which received a total of €2.91 million from Horizon 2020 between 2017 and 2019. Idemia recently won a contract for the delivery of a new shared Biometric Matching System which will integrate a database of over 400 million th…
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