New York’s use of facial recognition technology is expanding via a partnership between its Department of Motor Vehicles and that of New Jersey. The two organizations have agreed to use the technology to cross-check driver’s license applicants in each jurisdiction.
New York’s DMV has already used the technology to make over 3500 arrests connected to fraudulent license applications – part of a broader deployment of the technology by state authorities. And similar systems are starting to be deployed elsewhere in the country, as in the case of the Arizona Department of Transportation, which has used the technology to boost its fraud detection by a whopping 860 percent. Now, New York authorities are looking to further leverage the technology by cracking down on those cases in which drivers have licenses issued in both states, an illegal practice that is often the result of a license suspension in one state followed by a fraudulent license application in the other.
They are the first two states in the country to embark on such a collaboration, and they’re unlikely to be the last, given the advantages offered by such technology. But as such deployments proliferate, they are also likely to lead to more push-back from privacy and civil rights advocates – pressures that are coming even from concerned legislators within the federal government. For now, though, DMV deployments are innocuous enough, and are helping state authorities to keep their roads safe.
Source: CBS New York
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August 18, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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