According the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are already incorporating facial recognition technology into their extensive biometric databases. These databases are accessible to state and local law enforcement and other federal agencies. What’s more, businesses such as Apple, Facebook, and various mobile app providers have already begun to index faces for private face recognition databases.
Significant First and Fourth Amendment issues are raised by the application of facial recognition technology.
According to EFF Staff Attorney, Jennifer Lynch, who testified at a Senate hearing on the 17th, the scope of Constitutional protections in this area is unclear. Lynch said one problem is “[f]ace recognition allows for covert, remote and mass capture and identification of images—and the photos that may end up in a database include not just a person’s face but also how she is dressed and possibly whom she is with.”
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