Despite concerns over facial recognition's impact on civil liberties, public agencies have continued to apply the tool liberally across the U.S. with one of the biggest deployments coming to an airport near you.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that it plans to expand its application of facial recognition to 97 percent of all passengers departing the U.S. by 2023, according to the Verge.

By comparison, facial recognition technology is deployed in just 15 airports, according to figures recorded at the end of 2018.

In what is being referred to as 'biometric exit,' the agency plans to use facial recognition to more thoroughly track passengers entering and leaving the country.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that it plans to expand its application of facial recognition to 97 percent of all passengers departing the U.S. by 2023

The system functions by taking a picture of passengers before they depart and then cross-referencing the image with a database containing photos of passports and visas.

According to the DHS, the technology is not only scalable, but also extremely accurate.

In its current iteration, a summary states that the technology has scanned more than 2 million passengers with a near-perfect match rate of 98 percent.

In its limited deployment, the DHS says that it has helped to identify 7,000 passenger overstays since being introduced in 2017 as well as six passengers attempting to use identification not belonging to them.

While public institutions around the U.S. have been eager to incorporate facial recognition for collecting data, both advocacy groups, and more recently big tech companies, have pumped the brakes.

Among the most unlikely voices of caution against the widespread deployment of facial recognition has been Microsoft -- one of the biggest and most sophisticated purveyors of facial recognition software.

This month the company announced that it denied lending its software to an unnamed California law enforcement agency who planned to use the tool to scan the faces of people the agency pulled over, so that it could be checked against a database.

The reason behind the decision, according to Microsoft President, Brad Smith, is that the company felt the software -- artificial intelligence systems that use machine learning to improve its capabilities -- would disproportionately affect people of color and women.

Facial recognition software has become increasingly enticing to law enforcement and other public agencies, but some big tech companies have pumped the brakes.

Microsoft's tool is trained on mostly white male subjects, making it less efficient at identifying women and people of color and therefore increasing the risks involved with using the technology.

Elsewhere in California, lawmakers have also debated banning the use of facial recognition software by public agencies.

San Francisco, which started mulling the moratorium this month, would become he first city in the U.S. to pass legislation on the tool if the policy is adopted.

Concerns over the deployment of the software have centered mostly on potential infringements of civil liberties.

One of the most vocal critics, the ACLU, has argued that scanning someone's face skirts laws involving probable cause and could be used for mass government surveillance.