Privacy of your BioID Account

Some people are concerned about biometrics and privacy. To address those concerns we want to explain some concepts of our service. The key to biometric recognition is the biometric template.  A biometric template is a mathematical representation of your unique features, generated from the photos taken during enrollment. It is irreversible, meaning that your photo cannot be extracted from it. When you need to be recognized, new photos are captured and their unique features are compared to your template.

The BioID Web Service (BWS) uses a biometric class ID to select a certain template from the storage. The biometric class ID (BCID) is the unique identifier used to store your biometrics. It is how you are identified to our biometric service. Your BCID is randomly generated and contains no way to identify you – thus ensuring your biometrics are kept anonymous. Furthermore, your template is only a mathematical representation of your unique features; it contains no photos itself and photos of you cannot be generated from it. Thus a stolen template would be of no use.

You may wonder how the anonymity is ensured if you can see your photos in the template management in your BioID profile and we ask you or a valid email address.

Your BioID account is managed by BioID Connect, which is a separate application independent of the BioID Web Service. By default BWS does not save any raw biometric data, including any photos; only biometric templates (an irreversible mathematical representation of your unique features) are stored in BWS and remain anonymous. Applications that use BWS, such as BioID Connect, may choose to save raw biometric data as long as the user is informed of this storage.

In the case of BioID Connect the enrollment photos used in your biometric template are stored so that you can see how the technology works. Only you have access to these photos. Finally, even if someone did get access to them, your BioID account uses liveness detection to ensure that enrollment and verification images come from a live person, not a photo. So your enrollment photos would be useless.

We use your email address only to provide services such as password reset and multi-factor authentication to send you an one-time security code as an SMS text message. Your biometric template is stored with only your anonymous Biometric Class ID (BCID) and completely separate from your email or any other personal information.