Many of California's local law enforcement agencies have access to facial recognition software for identifying suspects who appear in crime scene footage, documents obtained through public records requests show. Three California counties also have the capability to run facial recognition searches on each others' mug shot databases, and others could join if they choose to opt into a network maintained by a private law enforcement software company. The network is called California Facial Recognition Interconnect, and it's a service offered by DataWorks Plus, a Greenville, South Carolina–based company with law enforcement contracts in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Santa Barbara. Currently, the three adjacent counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino are able to run facial recognition against mug shots in each other's databases. That means these police departments have access to about 11.7 million mug shots of people who have previously been arrested, a majority of which come from the Los Angeles system.

This month US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) posted the latest in a series of Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) for its Traveler Verification Service (TVS) program. The latest PIA gives notice (although not in the form required by Federal law) that CBP and its airline and airport partners are carrying out a second expanded phase of "demonstrations" of TVS, an identity-as-a-service scheme designed to use automated recognition of images from a shared CBP/airline/airport database of facial photos for purposes including surveillance and control (for CBP) and business process automation and price personalization (for airlines and airports). CBP (1) describes TVS as a "biometric exit" program, (2) describes the current use of TVS as merely a "demonstration", (3) continues to claim that airlines and airports "have no interest in keeping or retaining" facial images any longer, or using them for any other purposes, than is required by CBP for "security", and (4) says that U.S citizens aren't required to submit to mug shots. These claims are intended to lull the public into not protesting: "This is only a test, using photos for limited purposes. The photos will be deleted once you get on the plane, and not used for nay commercial or other purpose."

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. The ACLU released a report on Thursday revealing that Rekognition, Amazon's facial recognition tool, had falsely matched 28 members of Congress to mug shots. Members of the ACLU purchased the version of Rekognition that Amazon offers to the general public and ran public photos of every member of the House and Senate against a database of 25,000 arrest photos. The entire experiment costed $12.33, which, as ACLU attorney Jake Snow writes in a blogpost, is "less than a large pizza." Almost 40 percent of the representatives that Rekognition falsely matched were people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress.

But if the woman hadn't had a minor traffic violation previously, she might have languished in the hospital, according to Sgt. Coello and the commanding officer of the New York Police Department's Real Time Crime Center want access to the Department of Motor Vehicles database of driver's licenses. Supervisors of the Facial Identification Section, launched as a pilot in 2011, see utilizing facial recognition to identify missing people as the next frontier of a technology that until now has been used mostly to identify potential suspects or witnesses for detectives investigating crimes. Critics say obtaining a DMV database--with thousands of photographs of innocent New Yorkers--raises serious privacy concerns. "The only way we can identify them right now is if they've been arrested," said Inspector Joseph Courtesis, commanding officer of the Real Time Crime Center, which oversees the facial identification section.

Fifty civil rights groups have signed a letter asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate police use of facial-recognition databases following a report that half of America's adults have their images stored in at least one searchable facial-recognition database used by local, state and federal authorities They argue the technology disproportionately affects minorities and has minimal oversight. Researchers even found The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona has enrolled all of Honduras' driver's licenses and mug shots into its database. States in dark blue use drivers license photos in police facial recognition databases. Red dots represent other jurisdictions using facial recognition. Of the 52 agencies that acknowledged using face recognition, only one obtained legislative approval for its use and only one agency provided evidence that it audited officers' face recognition searches for misuse. Not one agency required warrants, and many agencies did not even require an officer to suspect someone of committing a crime before using face recognition to identify her.

Photographs of nearly half of all U.S. adults--117 million people--are collected in police facial recognition databases across the country with little regulation over how the networks are searched and used, according to a new study. Along with a lack of regulation, critics question the accuracy of facial recognition algorithms. Meanwhile, state, city, and federal facial recognition databases include 48 percent of U.S. adults, said the report from the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. The search of facial recognition databases is largely unregulated, the report said. "A few agencies have instituted meaningful protections to prevent the misuse of the technology," its authors wrote.

Photographs of nearly half of all U.S. adults -- 117 million people -- are collected in police facial recognition databases across the country with little regulation over how the networks are searched and used, according to a new study. Along with a lack of regulation, critics question the accuracy of facial recognition algorithms. Meanwhile, state, city, and federal facial recognition databases include 48 percent of U.S. adults, said the report from the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. The search of facial recognition databases is largely unregulated, the report said. "A few agencies have instituted meaningful protections to prevent the misuse of the technology," its authors wrote.