Australian Face Verification Service starts with citizenship imagery

Australia's descent into a federal government-backed biometric future began on Wednesday, with the first three agencies to be on board the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the Australian Federal Police (AFP), and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP). The first tranche of data to be swapped by the new Face Verification Service will be citizenship images, with visa, passport, and driver licence photos to follow. In August last year, the Attorney-General's Department (AGD) said access would be expanded to include the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Defence, and the AGD. Clear-cut definition of de-identified data critical in legislation: Pilgrim Department of Finance to rebuild two-year-old IT system Turnbull's DTA to establish a whole-of-government program management office Vodafone continues losing customers as Telstra, Optus, Amaysim gain: Kantar The AU$18.5 million system is designed to replace existing manual, ad-hoc facial image sharing arrangements between agencies to verify identities, and avoids the creation of a centralised database by agencies receiving queries running image searches against their own databases, an AGD fact sheet [PDF] claims. "Often, this response will be a simple'yes' or'no' to indicate whether two images are of the same person," AGD said.