Some of the world’s most popular tech giants dominate this week’s roundup of Mobile ID World’s top stories, with Apple, Tesla, and TikTok all making appearances.
The latter, however, has been getting attention for the wrong reasons. The hugely popular, China-based social media app recently updated its privacy policy, and in so doing gave itself permission to collect the face and voice biometrics of its US-based users. It can also scan the environments in which users record their videos for the app, and it can record a text transcription of their audio:
TikTok Permits Itself to Collect User Biometrics, Scan Their Surroundings in Privacy Policy Update
Apple, meanwhile, made waves with some important innovation concerning its Wallet app for the iPhone. The company announced that it’s planning to let iPhone users upload virtual driver’s licenses and state IDs to the app, and that it’s working with the Transportation Security Administration to let them present the virtual cards as official ID at the airport. In other words, Apple has become the latest big tech company to step into the emerging mobile ID space:
Apple to Enable Mobile ID Cards, Including Driver’s Licenses, in Wallet App
As for Tesla, the electric vehicle maker got some attention thanks to a newly published patent concerning biometric technology. The intellectual property filing describes how facial recognition could be used in Tesla’s upcoming Cybertruck vehicle in order to automatically adjust in-vehicle settings tailored to the driver’s preferences, among other functionality:
Patent Suggests Tesla Will Personalize Cybertruck With Facial Recognition
Beyond consumer tech giants, Mobile ID World readers also showed sustained interest this week in SITA’s recent warning that regional airports are going to deal with a huge influx of traffic after travel restrictions are lifted, and that they should embrace cloud-based and mobile technologies to help facilitate those higher passenger volumes:
SITA Encourages Regional Airports to Embrace Cloud, Mobile Technologies
And finally, a blast from the past: a number of Mobile ID World visitors resurfaced an article from late 2017 announcing that Discover was enabling its cardholders to access their online accounts using the iPhone’s Face ID authentication system. It seems that this popularity was likely the result of a new bug on the Discover Mobile app that is now preventing users from doing just that:
Discover Enables Face ID Login for Mobile App
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Stay posted to Mobile ID World next week as we continue to bring you the latest news and interviews from the exciting world of digital identity. To see the hottest stories of the week in biometrics, visit our sibling site FindBiometrics.
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