Vietnam Upgrades Dystopian Biometric ID System

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Vietnam Upgrades Dystopian Biometric ID System - Encounter Today - Blog

Vietnam’s Communist government is pushing towards the full implementation of their digital transformation project called “Developing an Application for Population Database, Digital Identification and Authentication for the National Digital Transformation from 2022-2025, with a Vision to 2030.” The project is also known as Project 06.

Face, fingerprint, iris, voice and DNA biometrics are all included in the scheme are will be mandatory in order to obtain a digital ID card, as well as being necessary to utilize essential services such as cashless payments, obtaining medical diagnoses, etc.

The updated comprehensive biometric ID system will come into effect on July 1, 2024 thanks to the freshly amended 2023 Law on Identification.

Le Tan Toi, Vietnam’s chairman of the National Defense and Security Committee, says the amendments were necessary because unlike fingerprints which could be damaged or altered, an individual’s iris doesn’t change which serves the government identity verification methods more than other characteristics.

Ccybersecurity expert at NordVPN, Adrianus Warmenhoven, told TechRadar that “all recorded data is hackable… [B]iometric information is a valuable target for cybercriminals, and hacking of this type of data becomes a popular way of identity theft.”

“While we are the owners of our own faces and voices, we are not the only ones with access to them. Over the years of being active social media users, people [have] left so much biometric data that with the current capabilities of artificial intelligence to create deep fakes, it becomes a weapon against our privacy.”

As of July 1st, the authorities will have the ability to plug in citizens’ biometric details into a national database system which will be under the management of the national police force, the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security.

Vietnamese police will be able to begin the voluntary collection of DNA information, including voice samples, from citizens as young as 14 years of age, this differs to their current abilities which limits them to solely collecting citizens’ facial images and fingerprints.

The amended law will now permit the national police force to encrypt and store citizens’ information in the chip-based identity cards, meanwhile, allowing criminal investigatory agencies to gather biometric data of persons of interest.

The database of citizen’s sensitive data will be managed by the national police force.

Lawmakers and critics have spoken out against the new amendments seeing as they pose serious risks to privacy, as well as potential data violations. Some of the fears raised around the new law include; the potential for these biometrics to be used for the purpose of surveillance, the ability for cybercriminals to use biometric data for identity theft, amongst other related crimes.

Some proponents are trying to justify the amendments, saying that they will help authorities “govern internet services”, whilst their opponents say this is all an attempt by the authorities to monitor government critics and dissenters.

The Vietnamese government has initiated a PR campaign to A. inform the public on the implementation of the digital identity scheme and B. to try and convince the public of the program’s societal benefits.

At present, Vietnam is ranked 178 out of 189 in the 2023 Reporters Without Borders World Freedom Press Index, whilst the communist country is ranked 22 out of 100 in the Free on the Net report for 2022.

Bringing things a little closer to home, the National Football League (NFL) is on track to implement biometric ID verification in all the venues during this season – that’s 30 stadiums and 32 teams.

The identity and access management (IAM) system, based on NFL’s Express Access platform, that had been in the testing phase for three-and-a-half years produced a pilot which included six teams last season.

The method is now supposed to be implemented league-wide, noting that the facial recognition system will be centralized and that the likely key component will be provided by Wicket, a computer vision company.

These methods of using an individual’s biometrics are meant to slowly numb societies to the fact that those who seek to implement these programs are chipping away at our privacy surrounding our personal data.

Where there should be utter outrage, there is apathy.

Personal data has been used to describe our online activity but we must now change our way of thinking around this subject and understand that this is actually about our personal features being used and stored.

Increasing the adoption of biometric ID’s will inevitably increase the use of biometric surveillance systems, such as AI-powered facial recognition in public places and government services as they already have in the Communist nation of China.

In 2024, our faces are the final frontier of privacy.

In order to combat some of the threats such biometric surveillance systems bring forward, free-face territories are on the rise in law. One such provision is made in the proposed EU AI Act which bans the use of live biometrics in public places.

The world needs more privacy not less of it. The concern we face today is with the apathy that now exists thanks to decades of governments chipping away at our rights to privacy.

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Tags: News
Tags: Biometric, Dystopian, Dystopian Biometric ID System, ID System, Vietnam

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