The Biometrics Institute has received Australian government assistance to fund the next stage of the development of a new privacy Trust Mark. And Lockstep Consulting is again working with the Institute to bring this privacy initiative to fruition.
A detailed feasibility study was undertaken by Lockstep in the first half of 2015, involving numerous privacy advocates, regulators and vendors in Europe, the US, New Zealand and Australia.
We found strong demand for a reputable, non-trivial B2C biometrics certification.
Privacy advocates are generally supportive of a new Trust Mark, however they stress that a Trust Mark can be counter-productive if it is too easy to obtain, biased by industry interests, and/or poorly policed. There is general agreement that a credible trust mark should be non-trivial, and consequently, that the criteria be reasonably prescriptive. The reality of a strong Trust Mark is that not all architectures and solution instances will be compatible with the certification criteria.
The next stage of the Biometrics Institute project will deliver technical criteria for the award of the Trust Mark, and a PIA (Privacy Impact Assessment) template. A condition of the Trust Mark will be that a PIA is undertaken.
Please contact Steve Wilson at Lockstep swilson@lockstep.com.au or Isabelle Moeller (Biometrics Institute CEO) isabelle@biometricsinstitute.org, if you’d like to receive further details of the Stage 1 findings, or would like to contribute to the technical research in Stage 2.