I see obtaining a warrant to place two objects (a face and a biometric security device) in proximity as more compatible with civil liberties than taking mugshots or fingerprints upon a suspect’s booking.
The cost of a security should not exceed the value of the information you are protecting combined with the fallout of its disclosure. Face recognition is cheap, but my data are also worthless and every single utterance or act I’ve stored digitally would only generate boredom if disclosed. So it is fine to use faceid to protect my digital assets.
Then again, I don’t trade in child pornography.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/doj-claims-its-w...
Also, when the unlock process is checking for a match, is it creating a derivative work? Would this legal argument hold any more weight if you formally registered the copyright? (You'd think that two people taking two pictures of a vaguely similar public subject on different days could not amount to a copyright violation, but a court might disagree[0]).
Finally, does someone registering (or unlocking a device with) their biometrics grant a licence to or even ownership of that data to the company who manufactured the device? It would be interesting if the FBI had to request permission from Apple to create a derivative work of "their" copy of your face stored in their/your device.
[0] https://www.wpt.co.uk/resources/news/copyright-in-photograph...
