Over a third of the red flags produced by the New York DMV’s facial recognition system have arrived since it was upgraded at the start of last year, according to new figures from the Governor’s office.
The facial recognition system was initially deployed in 2010, when it used 64 different points of measurement in capturing the facial biometrics of driver license applicants. In January of 2016, it was upgraded to map 128 biometric points, an improvement that immediately led to stronger results.
There has now been 21,000 cases of potential identity fraud flagged by the system, with about 16,000 individuals facing administrative action and over 4,000 fraudsters having been arrested.
It’s an illustration of the benefits of using facial recognition to weed out fraud in identity document applications, with the technology having also been embraced by licensing authorities elsewhere in the country and even north of the border. And while some DMVs have come under fire for allowing the FBI to apply its facial recognition technology to their databases of citizens’ IDs, the New York DMV is not thought to be one of the states that have participated in that program, and seems to have used biometric technology only on an internal basis, and specifically to detect and disrupt fraud.
Sources: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Ars Technica
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August 25, 2017 – by Alex Perala
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