Facebook’s Person-Centric Biometric Database Is Bigger Than The FBI’s

Monday, October 26, 2015
By Paul Martin

by Thomas Dishaw
THOMASDISHAW.COM
October 25th, 2015

Another reason to dump Facebook if you haven’t already. According to reports their biometric database is bigger than the FBI’s.

If you have a Facebook page (who doesn’t?) and you worry about your privacy, you may want to rethink posting photos of your face on there. We told you in the past that Facebook has billions of high-quality photos of many of its 1.5 billion users.

In fact, its database of faces rivals or surpasses that of the FBI, which last year had 50 billion images. It’s using those photos for its Next Generation Identification, which is improving on its use of fingerprints to identify people.

At one time, the FBI had the world’s largest person-centric biometric database. But Facebook likely has the FBI beat on that front, and that’s got governments interested in your photos.

In fact, the Australian government may start collecting biometric data on its citizens and, importantly, non-citizens as part of the country’s immigration policies. Now, Australia is proposing creating a database of faces that may include siphoning images from social media sites like Facebook, for its anti-terrorism efforts.

The Australian Minister of Justice last month said the government will spend about $13 million creating its National Facial Biometric Matching Capability. They claim that this won’t compromise anyone’s privacy as it won’t be a centralized database.

If it moves forward, Facebook is a logical place for them to find images of people’s faces. Facebook has an incredibly rich database of photos that people post there themselves.

Facebook has facial recognition software called DeepFace that has something on the order of a quarter trillion photos that it can tap into. It’s designed to find your photos by either looking in your profile, or the profiles of your friends and family.

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