Sanjay Dharwadker

(Published on the ‘Trust in Transition’ WiSER substack.)

For automated facial biometrics to have happened as it did, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many diverse technologies and social circumstances needed to come together, which they did in serendipitous ways. There was the evolution of photography itself during much of the 1800s, its first use for photo ID, in 1876at the Centennial exhibition, Philadelphia, and events like the Lody spy scandal of 1914 involving USA, UK and Germany that hastened the mandatory use of photographs for passports.