Millions of Voiceprints Quietly Being Harvested

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Guardian: Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords. "We sometimes call it the invisible biometric," said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field. Those companies have helped enter more than 65M voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. ... The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where the mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up.

Comments

US Customs

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently returned home from an international trip. I don't travel outside the country very often, and this was my first encounter with the new kiosks that replace the old paper form asking where I went, why I went there, and what I brought home with me.

I was also fairly sure that the reason the Customs agent asked me to look directly at him and state my full name was that he was collecting a voice sample for future use. I think this article confirms that either this is already happening, or will very soon.