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If all goes as planned, the FBI’s facial recognition database will include 52 million photos by 2015, the Verge reports.
That’s an increase of more than three-fold from the 16 million that were in the database in the middle of 2013.
Of those, 4.3 million images were for “non-criminal purposes,” according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
What remains unclear is where the non-criminal photos derived and why the FBI is using them.
“Facial recognition technology has the potential to improve services for consumers, support innovation by businesses, and affect identification and authentication online and offline,” the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in a statement this past February. “However, the technology poses distinct consumer privacy challenges.”
