Perspectives on the intersection of technology and privacy.

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Identity Primer: Biometrics 101 Video
Mary Haskett Mary Haskett

Identity Primer: Biometrics 101 Video

Our co-founder Dr. Alex Kilpatrick has a lot of experience working with biometrics. The various modalities of biometrics (face, iris and fingerprint are the most common) have different applications. This video is a broad overview of the three most popular biometric modalities and common misconceptions about them.

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Identity Primer: Privacy (The Tor Browser)
Alex Kilpatrick Alex Kilpatrick

Identity Primer: Privacy (The Tor Browser)

The Tor Browser is designed to provide anonymous internet use. It isolates each website you visit so third-party trackers and ads can't follow you. Any cookies automatically clear when you're done browsing. Tor Browser prevents someone watching your connection from knowing what websites you visit.

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Identity Primer: What is Face Recognition?
Alex Kilpatrick Alex Kilpatrick

Identity Primer: What is Face Recognition?

Face matching is the easiest biometric for humans to identify with because we have done it literally from birth. And for the most part we are much better at it than computers - we can recognize faces with very little information, especially if they are familiar.

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Identity Primer: Retina vs. Iris Eye Biometrics
Mary Haskett Mary Haskett

Identity Primer: Retina vs. Iris Eye Biometrics

The retina is not a widely used biometric, because the process is painful and difficult. Most of the time, if you hear someone talking about retina scanning, they are actually talking about iris recognition.

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Identity Primer: What Are Biometrics?
Mary Haskett Mary Haskett

Identity Primer: What Are Biometrics?

The word "biometric" is a combination of "bio" (human) and "metric" (measurement). In simple terms it is all about measuring things about humans that make them different from other humans.

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How Computers See the World
Alex Kilpatrick Alex Kilpatrick

How Computers See the World

We have spent a lot of time teaching computers how to recognize people. There are always cases where the computer performs surprisingly poorly and surprisingly well. The surprise is because computer “see” in a fundamentally different way from people.

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Defeating Big Brother
Mary Haskett Mary Haskett

Defeating Big Brother

With cameras on every street corner and the growing use of biometric technology in the consumer space, it's good to know how to avoid being recorded. This Ignite! presentation was originally given in 2010 at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City.

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