What is Biometric Data?
Biometric Data — data derived from a person's physical or behavioral characteristics, such as voice or face, which most privacy laws treat as a special and more tightly restricted category.
Biometric data is information about a person's body or behavior used to identify them. Fingerprints, facial images, iris scans, voice prints and gait are the common examples. What makes the category distinct is that the data is the person: unlike a password, it cannot be changed after a breach.
Because of that, most privacy regimes single it out for stricter treatment. The GDPR treats biometric data used for unique identification as a special category, requiring a higher legal basis than ordinary personal data. Several US states — Illinois, Texas and Washington among them — have dedicated biometric statutes with their own consent requirements, and Illinois' law carries a private right of action that has produced a long line of litigation.
Voice sits in an awkward position in this landscape. A speech recording is not automatically biometric data — someone reading a script is ordinary personal data — but a voiceprint, or any processing whose purpose is to identify a person by voice, generally is. The distinction turns on the purpose of the processing rather than the file format, which is why the same recording can be ordinary data in one project and regulated biometric data in another.
For AI training the practical questions are whether the intended use involves identification, and whether the applicable jurisdiction has a biometric statute. A dataset collected for text-to-speech synthesis and a dataset collected to build speaker recognition are made of similar audio and carry very different legal exposure.
Related terms
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PII
Personally Identifiable Information — anything that can identify a specific individual, directly or indirectly.
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Consent
The speaker knows how their recording will be used, and has signed to say so.
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Anonymization
Anonymization — removing or altering identifying information so a person can no longer be identified, in principle irreversibly, which is what separates it from pseudonymization.
Keep reading
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Full glossary
Every term we explain, in one list.
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Where these terms actually show up, and which ones change a quote.
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- No medical or clinical data. No recorded telephone calls.