Police Use of Facial Recognition With License Databases Spur Privacy Concerns

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal (June 17, 2018): "Police in the small Maryland city of Hagerstown used a cutting edge, facial recognition program last week to track down a robbery suspect, marking one of the first such instances of the tactic to be made public."

When police in Hagerstown used a cutting edge, facial recognition program to track down a robbery suspect last week, it was one of the first such cases to come to light. In the process of identifying a possible suspect, investigators fed an Instagram photo into the state’s vast facial recognition system, which quickly spit out the driver’s license photo of an individual who was then arrested.

This digital-age crime-solving technique is at the center of a debate between privacy advocates and law-enforcement officials: Should police be able to search troves of driver’s license photos, many who have never been convicted of a crime, with facial recognition software?

An increasing number of police departments across the country are running images through driver’s license databases in their investigations, but the Hagerstown case is one of the few resulting in an arrest that has become public, experts in the field say.

Thirty-one states now allow police to access driver’s license photos in facial-recognition searches in addition to mug shots, according to the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center.  Roughly one in every two American adults - 117 million people - are in the facial-recognition networks used by law enforcement, according to a 2016 report by the center.

Civil liberties advocates say that giving police unfettered access to photos of people who have committed no crimes infringes on their privacy."
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Facial recognition is nothing new.

An article in The Atlantic (October 19, 2016) stated: "Police departments in nearly half of U.S. states can use facial-recognition software to compare surveillance images with databases of ID photos or mugshots. Some departments only use facial-recognition to confirm the identity of a suspect who’s been detained; others continuously analyze footage from surveillance cameras to determine exactly who is walking by at any particular moment."

The Guardian (March 27, 2017) wrote: "Approximately half of adult Americans’ photographs are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI, without their knowledge or consent, in the hunt for suspected criminals. About 80% of photos in the FBI’s network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver’s licenses and passports. The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are more likely to misidentify black people than white people."

The question that we must ask ourselves is whether we should be subjects in a perpetual police line-up because we have submitted a photo for a driver's license or a passport. Some may argue that facial recognition is being used a crime fighting tool or investigative technique that leads to the apprehension of criminals; and it does in fact lead to the identification and apprehension of criminals. The other side of this argument is that we have a right to privacy and should not have our personal information (i.e. photos) used by the government for purposes other than that which we have consented to when providing that information. Our greatest concern is not the use of data, rather it is the abuse of data by government officials.