MESSY! Is Face ID bad for you? Check out Apple, Microsoft, ID.me and more

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Verifying your identity used to be so simple. You’d show a picture on your driver’s license or passport and these were two objects that lived in your pocket or a drawer at home. Today, you can be identified by an array of digital representations of your face via the likes of Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and lesser known names like ID.me, which will soon scan the faces of U.S. citizens who want to manage their taxes online with the Internal Revenue Service. On the surface, these services are simple, but the number of companies processing faceprints is also growing, raising some hard questions about how we want to be identified — and even classified — in the future.

One way to imagine today’s complex web of facial recognition vendors is to think of the Internet as being like The National Portrait Gallery in London. The public portraits that are freely on display are a bit like the billions of photos people post on social media, which some facial-recognition vendors scrape up. Clearview AI Inc. is one company that openly does this. U.S. government agencies and police departments use its search tool to scour more than 10 billion public photos to see if they’ll match certain suspects. PimEyes is another search engine that both investigators and stalkers have used to scan social media for a facial match.

Then if you walk further into The National Portrait Gallery, you’ll find private exhibitions that you pay to see. It’s similar on the web, with companies such as ID.me, Apple, Microsoft and others hired to privately process and verify faces, essentially acting as gatekeepers of that data. For instance, several U.S. states including Maryland and Georgia recently tapped Apple to store state IDs and drivers licenses on their