To impact many US citizens.
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By Raif Karerat
Up until the present, the FBI claimed it did not have any oversight over the fingerprints collected by employers.
However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently reported that fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes.
Per the EFF:
The change, which the FBI revealed quietly in a February 2015 Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), means that if you ever have your fingerprints taken for licensing or for a background check, they will most likely end up living indefinitely in the FBI’s NGI database. They’ll be searched thousands of times a day by law enforcement agencies across the country—even if your prints didn’t match any criminal records when they were first submitted to the system.
This development will impact many U.S. citizens beyond the prospective police officers or childcare workers who are required to submit their fingerprints for background checks.
For example, residents of Texas are required to provide their fingerprints if you want to be an engineer, doctor, realtor, stockbroker, attorney, or an architect, according to the website Biometric Update. Meanwhile, all jobs with the federal government have mandatory fingerprint checks, including part-time food service workers, student interns, designers, customer service representatives, and maintenance workers.
“This violates our democratic ideals and our societal belief that we should not treat people as criminals until they are proven guilty,” the EFF argues.
The other major change to the FBI’s biometrics programs is that the agency is now planning to add photographs taken in the field to its already enormous face recognition database.
The EFF claims a database of photos will make it easier for the FBI and the U.S. government to track people as they move about.