An Example of Privacy and Data Protection Best Practices for Biometrics Data Processing in Border Control: Lesson Learned from SMILE

TL;DR

This paper discusses privacy and data protection best practices in biometric border control systems, emphasizing lessons learned from the European SMILE project to guide developers and data controllers.

Contribution

It provides a practical example of integrating privacy and data protection by design in biometric systems, based on real-world lessons from the SMILE project.

Findings

Best practices for privacy in biometric border control

Guidance for legal compliance in data processing

Lessons learned from the SMILE project

Abstract

Biometric recognition is a highly adopted technology to support different kinds of applications, ranging from security and access control applications to low enforcement applications. However, such systems raise serious privacy and data protection concerns. Misuse of data, compromising the privacy of individuals and/or authorized processing of data may be irreversible and could have severe consequences on the individual's rights to privacy and data protection. This is partly due to the lack of methods and guidance for the integration of data protection and privacy by design in the system development process. In this paper, we present an example of privacy and data protection best practices to provide more guidance for data controllers and developers on how to comply with the legal obligation for data protection. These privacy and data protection best practices and considerations are based on the lessons learned from the SMart mobILity at the European land borders (SMILE) project.