Australia's facial recognition database will now include driver's licence photos

Move over Face ID, the Australian government has eclipsed you on the creepy factor.

It'll allow for photos from government I.D.s and licenses to be added to a national facial recognition database, making it easier for the country's law enforcement agencies to identify people in real time.

The announcement was made on Thursday by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, following an agreement between all the country's states and territories. It will be up and running next year, and the government says the database will help bolster national security.

"To be quite clear about this, this is not accessing information, photo I.D. information that is not currently available. We’re talking about bringing together essentially federal government photo I.D.s, passports, visas and so forth, together with driver's licences," Turnbull said.

"These are all available to law enforcement agencies now and have been for many years, if not for generations. But what we have not been doing them is accessing them in a modern 21st Century way.

"It shouldn't take seven days to be able to verify someone's identity or to seek to match a photograph of somebody that is a person of interest. It should be able to be done seamlessly in real time."

The "Face Verification Service," as it's officially called, was first launched in 2016. It initially however only had access to images from visas and passports — Thursday's announcement now means agencies will have access to every driver's licence photo in the country.

Australia isn't alone. The FBI in the U.S. has a facial recogition system, although it seemingly forgot to tell people about it.

Privacy concerns

Of course, building a database full of nearly every citizen's face should be concerning. To privacy advocates, it's another example of civil liberties being slowly eroded by governments.

"This decision is nothing less than a complete betrayal of a fundamental civil liberty of all Australians," Jon Lawrence, executive officer of Electronic Frontiers Australia said in a statement.

"If implemented, it will ensure that the presumption of innocence no longer has any effective meaning in this country. Such an untargeted, mass surveillance database is just the latest attempt by governments to categorise everyone as potential suspects, not citizens."

With the effect of certain high-profile hacks coming to light recently, there's also concern that governments won't be able to guard this information.

"The public need to be able to trust that governments can adequately house and protect this information," Tim Singleton Norton, chair of Digital Rights Watch, said in a statement.

"We have seen breaches from agencies such as the Australian Federal Police, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection or the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to name just a few. This should make it very clear that this government is ill-equipped to properly protect citizen's data."

At a press conference on Wednesday, Turnbull dismissed these privacy concerns by pointing to the "enormous amount" of people's data out there already.

"There has never been more data on citizens than there is today," he said.

"The vast bulk of it is actually in the private sector and most of it, if you think about the amount of personal data, photographs and so forth, that are held on Facebook accounts, I think around three-quarters of Australians have Facebook accounts, so there is a lot of data out there."

Still doesn't make us feel better about the whole thing.