About
A citizen-originated framework
Origin
The MyFace Biometric Sovereignty Standard was developed by Toby Dupres, a UK citizen and web developer, in response to the observable and documented failure of existing governance frameworks to adequately protect biometric data.
It began as an observation: a governance gap exists between what facial recognition technology enables and what any current law prevents. That gap is not hypothetical. It is measurable, documented and widening. Existing organisations have largely responded by opposing the technology. The MyFace Biometric Sovereignty Standard responds by governing it.
The framework — the Why, the Proposal, and the API Specification — was developed in the first quarter of 2026 and published at biometricsovereigntystandard.org.uk.
Licence and Attribution
The MyFace Biometric Sovereignty Standard — the Declaration, the Proposal, and the API Specification — is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0).
You are free to share, adapt and build upon any part of this framework for any non-commercial purpose, provided you give appropriate credit to Toby Dupres as the original author, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The only condition is attribution. Toby Dupres retains no commercial interest in the framework and seeks none. The goal is adoption, not ownership.
A note on how this was developed
The MyFace Biometric Sovereignty Standard was developed in conversation with an AI assistant. The ideas, instincts and principles are entirely human in origin — the observation of the governance gap, the architectural decisions, the philosophical framework, the demand for meaningful enforcement.
The AI assisted in structuring the arguments, drafting the documents, and developing the technical specification. It asked questions that prompted thinking that had not yet been articulated. In this sense the collaboration is itself an example of what thoughtful human-AI interaction can produce when the human remains the author.
This is acknowledged honestly because the MyFace Biometric Sovereignty Standard is partly about transparency — about the relationship between humans and the systems that process their data. It would be inconsistent to be opaque about the process by which it was produced.
Get involved
The MyFace Biometric Sovereignty Standard is offered freely to any person, organisation or government that wishes to adopt, adapt or build upon it. If you are working in policy, law, technology or civil society and want to engage with this framework, please get in touch.
If you are a developer who wants to contribute to the protocol specification, the source documents are available and contributions are welcome provided attribution is maintained.
If you are a citizen who wants to help this reach the people who can act on it — share it, send it to your MP, send it to the ICO, send it to anyone who will listen.
Contact
[email protected]