Smile, You’re in a Criminal Database
Turns out that driver’s license photos are useful for more than acute embarrassment. States, realizing they have a de-facto visual database of most of their residents, are increasingly plugging those photos into facial-recognition software and Facebook to solve crimes — and worrying privacy advocates in the process.
Police say the databases are becoming an invaluable aid in solving crimes, allowing them to quickly compare a photo from Facebook or a surveillance camera with official records and potentially make an ID.
But for privacy advocates, the technology is emblematic of a disturbing trend where identification techniques once applied only to criminals now apply to society at large, raising prospects that universal ID will become a reality before we know it’s there.
“As a society, do we want to have total surveillance?” Laura Donohue, a Georgetown University law professor, asked the Post. “Do we want to give the government the ability to identify individuals wherever they are . . . without any immediate probable cause?…A police state is exactly what this turns into if everybody who drives has to lodge their information with the police.”
(via Washington Post)
Image credits: Photographs by OregonDOT, Mrazvan22, and Quevaal
