52 Million Photos In FBI's Face Recognition Database By Next Year 108
Advocatus Diaboli writes "The EFF has been investigating the FBI's Next-Generation Identification (NGI) scheme, an enormous database of biometric information. It's based on the agency's fingerprint database, which already has 100 million records. But according to the documents EFF dug up, the NGI database will include 52 million images of people's faces by 2015. At least 4.3 million images will have been taken outside any sort of criminal context. 'Currently, if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, your prints are sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database. However, the FBI has never before collected a photograph along with those prints. This is changing with NGI. Now an employer could require you to provide a 'mug shot' photo along with your fingerprints. If that's the case, then the FBI will store both your face print and your fingerprints along with your biographic data.'"
Re:I grew a beard (Score:5, Informative)
Let's see how they handle that, as I keep messing around with facial hair 8^{)>
Modern facial recognition seems to be immune to facial hair changes, as well as other simple attempts to fool it. It is based more on measurements of bone structure, and distances between certain facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth. Also, sophisticated AI software is used to make the system robust against changes to some of these features as well. Unless you wear a bag over your head, it's pretty hard to fool modern systems.