Recently the Australian Government quietly announced that the first stage of its facial verification system had gone live. What does this mean for the average Australian - today and into the future?

1. Recently the Australian Government quietly announced that the first
stage of its facial verification system had gone live. What does this mean
for the average Australian - today and into the future?
The Facial Verification System gives law enforcement and Government agencies
unprecedented access to biometric and biographical information about Australian
citizens.
Surprisingly the announcement by Minister of Justice, Michael Keenan, a little over a
week ago, was not widely reported by the mainstream media, despite concerns about
the FVS' impact on individual privacy.
Who gets access to your face?
The first phase of the platform allows the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
(DFAT) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to access the images on citizenship
applications held by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
Other types of images such as visa and passport photos will be added over time, with
the government also talking to states and territories to bring driver licence images into
the Facial Verification System.
Next year the system will be expanded to include identification of "unknown persons", to
assist investigations of serious offences. Minister Keenan said access in this case
would be restricted to "a limited number of users in specialist areas".
Access will also gradually be expanded to other police forces and security agencies
such as ASIO and Defence. The federal Attorney-General's Department is the lead
agency for managing access.

2. Could social media photo's be added to the FVS?
In short the answer is yes, but not immediately.
A Senate inquiry into the Facial Verification System heard late last year that the system
could eventually include non-official photos like those taken from Facebook and
Instagram.
At the time, Greens Senator, Scott Ludlam, asked if there was any law that could
prevent the system from ingesting photographs from publicly available sites, like
Facebook.
Andrew Rice from the Attorney-General's Department told the Senate:
It's possible that still images out of these kinds of environments could be put into the system.
That would be a choice for the users of the system."
He also said it would be possible to source still images from things like CCTV, but that
the poor quality of the images would potentially make them unviable.
What will the facial images be used for?
The justifaction for the facial verification system (FVS) is that name-based checking and
document-based checking is no longer reliable enough.
The Minister said the capability to share images was "necessary given the higher-quality
fraudulent identity documents being produced by criminals."
According to Minister Keenan the system will be used to identify unknown suspects of
serious crimes like terrorism, money-laundering, murder and child sexual exploitation.
"FVS provides the ability to match a person's photo against an image on one of their
existing government records.
We know that people previously convicted of terrorism offences in Australia have used
false identities to assist in planning terrorist attacks. This includes purchasing
ammunition and chemicals to make explosives and pre-paid mobile phones to
communicate anonymously"
Face Identification Investigation Service coming in 2017
A Face Identification Service (FIS) is expected to commence in 2017 to help determine
the identity of unknown persons. It will be used for investigations of serious offences by
specialist officers.
More information is available in the face matching services fact sheet:
 Face matching services - fact sheet [PDF 162KB]
 Face matching services - fact sheet [DOCX 1.19MB]