Daytona Beach approves police facial recognition searches of driver’s license photos
Daytona Beach has authorized its police department to use facial recognition technology to search driver's license photo databases. The policy gives officers a new tool to identify individuals by running images against state-held license records.
Why this matters: Driver's license photos are not mugshots. People hand them over to get a license, not to join a searchable biometric database. Daytona Beach just decided those photos are fair game for police facial recognition. That affects nearly every adult in the area, whether or not they have ever been suspected of anything. Facial recognition makes errors, and it makes more errors on darker-skinned faces. When a bad match leads to a wrongful stop or arrest, the person who suffers rarely has a clear way to find out how they ended up on the list in the first place.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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