If you have obtained or renewed a Tasmanian driver's licence in recent years your photo has been uploaded to a national facial recognition system.
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Facial recognition is just one form of biometrics: the use of physical characteristics to identify a person.
Other examples of biometric data are a person's fingerprints, voice patterns or DNA.
Your may use your biometric data regularly if you use your fingerprint or face to unlock your mobile phone or computer.
The data is used in a variety of ways and it can be an effective tool to quickly verify a person's identity for security or law enforcement purposes.
Following a 2017 Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services, the driver's licence photos of 410,000 Tasmanians were uploaded to a national facial recognition system.
The agreement was signed in a bid to reduce sophisticated criminal activity with identity fraud impacting one in every 20 Australians and costing $2.2 billion a year.
But a federal bipartisan Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security rejected this plan in October last year and recommended the legislation be rewritten.
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- Government says it will continue to collect biometric data from driver's licences
- Stop collecting personal data: MLCs to state government
- Facial recognition push 'potentially breaches privacy laws'
- Teens' driver licence data tracked in facial recognition push
The regime was found to lack safeguards, reporting parameters for the use of identity matching services by government and business, or accountability measures.
Despite the absence of a Federal legislative framework, Infrastructure Minister Michael Ferguson in December said the state government would continue to collect Tasmanians' driver's licence data.
This data has been uploaded to a segregated secure system under the control of the Department of State Growth which the government says has robust security, access and auditing requirements in place.
The state government amended Tasmania's vehicle and traffic regulations in 2017 to allow it to collect biometric data whenever a person sign forms to obtain or renew a licence, which did not require the approval of the Parliament.
The privacy statement on Tasmanian driver licence forms was updated in April 2018 to reflect the information collected would be used for national identity matching and verification purposes.
The collecting of Tasmanians' biometrics, through driver's licence photos, has been controversial with the Greens and independent Legislative Council members Tania Rattray and Meg Webb calling for the government to cease collecting this data due to privacy concerns.
The signing of the intergovernmental agreement by the government without public consultation has also been criticised.
University of Tasmania law lecturer Brendan Gogarty has suggested the data collection may have breached privacy laws but the government has defended its actions as lawful and transparent.
There is presently no access to Tasmanians' data by any agency or business and access will not be available until the national identity matching system is operational.
State and territory driver's licence information will gradually be implemented to support face verification and face identification services through the national Identity Matching Services system.
This data is stored within the National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution which is still in its initial stages.
Only Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia have provided driver's licence images to the NDLFRS with other states and territories to follow over the next two years.
The service's website says in future some private sector organisations will be able to use images for face verification services with a person's consent but face identification will be limited to government agencies.