Speaker recognition technology, deployed in sectors like banking, education, recruitment, immigration, law enforcement, and healthcare, relies heavily on biometric data. However, the ethical implications and biases inherent in the datasets driving this technology have not been fully explored. Through a longitudinal study of close to 700 papers published at the ISCA Interspeech Conference in the years 2012 to 2021, we investigate how dataset use has evolved alongside the widespread adoption of deep neural networks. Our study identifies the most commonly used datasets in the field and examines their usage patterns. The analysis reveals significant shifts in data practices since the advent of deep learning: a small number of datasets dominate speaker recognition training and evaluation, and the majority of studies evaluate their systems on a single dataset. For four key datasets–Switchboard, Mixer, VoxCeleb, and ASVspoof–we conduct a detailed analysis of metadata and collection methods to assess ethical concerns and privacy risks. Our study highlights numerous challenges related to sampling bias, re-identification, consent, disclosure of sensitive information and security risks in speaker recognition datasets, and emphasizes the need for more representative, fair, and privacy-aware data collection in this domain.

Speaker verification (SV) provides billions of voice-enabled devices with access control, and ensures the security of voice-driven technologies. As a type of biometrics, it is necessary that SV is unbiased, with consistent and reliable performance across speakers irrespective of their demographic, social and economic attributes. Current SV evaluation practices are insufficient for evaluating bias: they are over-simplified and aggregate users, not representative of usage scenarios encountered in deployment, and consequences of errors are not accounted for. This paper proposes design guidelines for constructing SV evaluation datasets that address these short-comings. We propose a schema for grading the difficulty of utterance pairs, and present an algorithm for generating inclusive SV datasets. We empirically validate our proposed method in a set of experiments on the VoxCeleb1 dataset. Our results confirm that the count of utterance pairs/speaker, and the difficulty grading of utterance pairs have a significant effect on evaluation performance and variability. Our work contributes to the development of SV evaluation practices that are inclusive and fair.