Natalia Kasperskaya Advises Against Mass Biometric Rollout in Russia Citing High Costs, Reliability Issues and Deepfake Threats

Natalia Kasperskaya, president of InfoWatch and chair of the board of the Domestic Software association, has cautioned against the indiscriminate rollout of biometric authentication systems throughout Russia, describing the approach as both costly and insufficiently secure.

In an interview with TASS, Kasperskaya stated that mass adoption of biometrics represents an expensive and not particularly reliable undertaking. She recommended restricting its use to selected processes and employing it solely as an additional layer of identity verification rather than a universal solution.

One of the principal obstacles, she noted, is the substantial financial outlay required. Facial recognition systems generate a digital model of a person’s face using thousands of reference points. Face ID, for example, projects more than 30,000 invisible points onto the user’s face. Scaling comparable technology nationwide would demand significant computational resources and vast data-storage infrastructure.

Practical challenges further complicate deployment. Biometric performance depends heavily on camera quality, lighting conditions and the clarity of the original image. Attempts to enrol or authenticate using older smartphones in dimly lit environments frequently fail to produce usable results.

An additional and increasingly serious threat comes from deepfakes. Artificial images and videos are becoming progressively more convincing, to the point where the human eye can no longer reliably differentiate between genuine photographs and sophisticated fakes. This development complicates identity verification and creates fresh opportunities for fraudsters.

Consequently, Kasperskaya sees no justification for positioning biometrics as a universal key for all services. In her view, the technology should be applied selectively and should complement, rather than replace, existing identification methods.

Russia already operates the Unified Biometric System, which allows citizens to access Gosuslugi, obtain electronic signatures or eSIM cards, and perform certain banking operations such as opening accounts or obtaining loans.