A newly formed US industry group has announced a set of principles that, it says, should protect users of biometrics against privacy abuses. The move is a bid to pre-empt attacks from civil libertarians and politicians anxious to capitalize on public anxiety about data privacy. The International Biometric Industry Association (IBIA) says its code calls for legislation to control government use of biometrics. But it would leave private industry unregulated except for voluntary adherence to the principles. "If the end-users and customers of the technology are cognizant of the [privacy] issues, this is clearly an area that can be self-regulated effectively," says Richard Norton, executive director of IBIA. A biometric is an electronic code representing some unique physical feature — commonly a person's hand geometry, iris pattern, fingerprint or face — that is used to verify that person's identity against a reference code provided by the person and stored digitally.
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