Technology and legal expert Professor Katina Michael said about 50 per cent of the population already had some kind of visual biometric stored in a nationally-accessible database, but the inclusion of drivers licenses would see the proportion of Australians scooped up in the net swell to about 80 per cent.
She said one of the biggest risks of the collection of biometric data was not deliberate misuse by the AFP, ASIO or another government agency, but rather vulnerabilities in the way biometrics work.
"It's not like a one-on-one match, where you put (in) an individual's face and say: 'they're a suspect'," Professor Michael said.
"But rather what you get returned is a number of possibilities … you might get back 15, or 20, or 30, or 50 matches.
Professor Michael said this meant that while over time a person's name might be cleared, their data could remain in a database linked to a criminal investigation.
She said real criminals and terrorists would opt out of the system, choosing not to have passports and driver's licenses in a bid to escape the net.
Stephen Wilson runs Lockstep Consulting, a Sydney-based firm which researches and tracks trends in biometrics in the corporate and government spheres, and advises clients on best-practice.
He said at the moment very secure biometric systems took quite a long time to process images accurately.
Problems arose when consumer convenience, such as being able to unlock a phone or access a bank account with a quick face or fingerprint scan, trumped security.
"The more exposure we have to electronic databases, the more exposure we have to biometric matching, it's only a matter of time before these bad actors succumb to temptation or they succumb to corruption and they wind up using these systems inappropriately."
"If you're trying to perpetrate a crime, if you're organised crime, and you're trying for example to produce a fake driver's licence, it's absolute gold for you to be able to come up with a list of photos that look like 'Steve Wilson'."
An annual industry survey conducted by the Biometrics Institute, known as the Industry Trend Tracker, has nominated facial recognition as the biometric trend most likely to increase over the next few years.
Respondents believed privacy and data protection concerns were the biggest constraint on the market, followed by poor knowledge of decision makers, misinformation about biometrics and opposition from privacy advocates.
