The Electronic Frontier Foundation has found that government researchers are collaborating with the FBI to develop a technology that will track people by their tattoos. Similar to the FBI’s mobile biometric methods of tracking people by digital fingerprinting or iris scanning, tracking tattoos would identify people by the messages and motivations behind their ink. The algorithms that would recognize people by their tattoos are problematic because they use images, mainly obtained from inmates, that do not comply with certain ethical standards.

Additionally, unlike fingerprint scans or facial recognition, the tattoo identification algorithm would make connections primarily based on assumptions about the political or religious beliefs of individuals based on their choice of ink. The EFF urges the government to suspend the project until they can obtain images that are not collected coercively from inmates.