In a move that is sure to set privacy advocates on fire, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is attempting to build the world's largest database of biometric data ever.
Currently the United States government is spending $1 billion dollars in an attempt to collect fingerprints, palm scans, faces, and iris scans. The plan is that this new database will make it quicker and easier to check people entering our borders or secured locations. A police officer pulling over a suspect will be able to fingerprint them and know within seconds if they are on a most wanted list.
While they also hope to be able to do facial scans of crowds to detect criminals or terrorists, that technology is not yet having the best of luck. In a recent six month long study in a busy train station in Germany, the software proved to only be accurate 60% of the time during good lighting, and only 10 - 20% accurate at night. German officials had hoped for a failure rate of only .1%, or 23 people out of the 23,000 that use it daily.
While the FBI does say that everyone who has interaction with the database is strictly monitored, it is still worrisome that so much data is kept in one location. Too many times the US government has lost a laptop that was never to leave a secured facility, releasing tens of thousands of personal bits of information into the wilds of the world.
(via The Washington Post)