Only 1% of Russians have issued a refusal to store biometrics – Kommersant

The number of Russians who have written a statement refusing to collect and place their biometric data in the Unified Biometric System (UBS) is about 1%. Deputy General Director of the Center for Biometric Technologies Dmitry Ter-Stepanov spoke about this at the conference “Fintech-2024. Development directions”organized by the Kommersant Publishing House.

According to him, despite the fake that a deadline was supposedly set for refusal, which was actively disseminated on social networks in August last year, queues at the MFC were observed “for a very short period of time.” “Only about 1% of our citizens wrote a statement about a ban on data transfer,” Mr. Ter-Stepanov clarified. “Now the number of people who write refusals has begun to approach zero.”

He recalled that last year companies were given the right to upload already collected biometric data to the EBS. “Everyone whose data was transferred to the EBS was notified by the company about this. Now the data of about half of the citizens has been transferred to the system,” said Dmitry Ter-Stepanov. According to him, these figures clearly demonstrate the gap between the information background that exists around biometric security issues and the real state of affairs in this area.

Also, the Deputy General Director of the Center for Biometric Technologies recalled that in addition to importing existing biometrics into the EBS, there is a procedure for voluntary data transfer. “At the beginning of the year there were about 200-300 thousand such records. And recently at VDNKh we awarded the millionth person who came and submitted this data. That is, the base of citizens who additionally submitted data has grown three times,” emphasized Dmitry Ter-Stepanov.

Read more about the process of filling EBS in the material “Human Reset”.