This is half a decade old news, but I only found this out myself after it accidentally came up in conversation at the DMV. The worker would not have informed me if it hadn’t come into conversation. Every DMV photo in the United States is being used for AI facial recognition, and nobody has talked about it for years. This is especially concerning given that citizens are recently being required to update their ID to a “Real ID,” which means more people than ever before are giving away the rights to their own face.
The biggest problem with privacy issues is that people talk about it for a while, but more often than not nothing ever happens to fix the problem, it simply gets forgotten. For example, in the next few years Copilot will simply become a part of people’s lives, and people will slowly stop talking about the privacy implications. What can we even do to fight the privacy practices of giants?
I see no issue with the government using photo ID pictures this way, just as long as they aren’t using third parties to handle the technical aspect of it or allowing any of the data to be handled by any third parties (eg private corps). They would be stupid to ignore that large amount of known good data they could train their facial rec models on. Yes it sounds big and evil but that’s the world we live in as long as this technology exists and you want to participate in society, I guess.
They’re collecting the data already, it’s being used this way already by everyone else, so why not?