You heard that right: Smiling has been banned in New Jersey. Well, it’s only been banned for driver’s license photos, but I doubt there would be many offenders anyway. (Ha!!1) The reason is mildly Orwellian: the Garden State is rolling out new software to try to track down license fraud with the use of facial recognition software that matches new photos to a database of all old driver’s license photos to make sure the same person isn’t getting licensed twice under assumed names. I guess the software doesn’t work well if one smiles, but wait, how many people are actually trying to get multiple licenses with their own face on there?The system (and the no-smiling policy) is nothing new; USA Today mentioned the varying degrees of smiles allowed by the more than half of states that use the software in 2009, and Illinois’ Drivers Services said that it had stopped thousands of fraudulent driver’s licenses from being issued since the state started a photo-matching program in 1999. Most states now use the software, although not all ban smiling.All the dumb smiling jokes aside, the major question is how useful the software actually is. The system in New Jersey is expected to cost $4.1 million, which isn’t insignificant. Curiously, I’ve yet to see a story on New Jersey’s Smilegate that reference anyone saying why the program is necessary. And, sure, the DMV already has digitized archives of photographs and it’s just a no-smile policy, but the rolling out of facial recognition software seems like just the kind of slippery slope that would have privacy and personal liberty advocates in an uproar.Illinois has around 8 million licensed drivers, and stated that it caught 6,000 cases of fraud from 1999-2009. Now, the numbers aren’t representative of every state’s fraud situation, but that’s less than a tenth of a percent of driver’s licenses. Is that amount of fraud worthy of setting up state-wide beta testing of facial recognition systems? I understand that it’s an issue ripe for paranoia, and the DMV does already have all those photos anyway. But as we’ve seen with the voter fraud debate — I love the stat that people are 3,615 times more likely to report a UFO sighting than to commit in-person election fraud — it’s altogether too easy for officials to create a fraud bogeyman where one doesn’t exist. More importantly, unlike with voter fraud, the rollout of face scanning software hasn’t received much debate at all.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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