US citizen here. I recently returned from my first international travel in a few years, and I was unpleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get back into the country.
In the returning citizens line, everyone was directed by an officer to one of three tablets each on a stand about 3-4 feet high. You stuck your face in the right spot for the camera and the tablet turned green. And that was it, free to go. No conversation with a human about where you went, no human verifying your passport, no need for the passport at all. Just a face scan (presumably matching a database of digitized passport photos) and you’re done.
Makes me wonder what the bar is for various local law enforcement or different federal agencies to get access to the database and hook in with surveillance cameras.
It’s everywhere.
Digital immigration went from the interesting exception to the somewhat chilling norm over the last ten years I’ve been traveling.
I’ve been face scanned and digital fingerprinted entering every country in recent memory.
So… Can you opt out and talk to a person without having your face scanned? I really don’t want another piece of identity that can be stolen and used against me in the form of identity theft or worse, in yet another database.
tldr: you can opt out, but it doesn’t matter.
At this point in history, opting out of a single face scan at the airport is sort of like walking on the beach for a mile and making a point of walking back to two specific footprints and wiping them away.
Between the ubiquitous phones pinging your phone every few feet or capturing your image, airplane cameras, the hundreds of cameras throughout the airport, thousands throughout the city on lampposts, in the buses you took, your taxis or rideshares, supermarkets, gas stations, bodegas and everywhere else, in the vast majority of countries your identity is being captured and tracked constantly.
That’s just where technology is at in the vast majority of countries at this point in history. I live outside of city centers, I use cash and don’t use rideshare apps, but I book plane tickets, I pass through city centers, I use ATMs to withdraw that cash, and 10 years ago in Vietnamese mountain villages I bikepacked to days away from the nearest town, where every building was a hand-built bamboo shack, every villager(about 30 people) had at least one smartphone.
A Viet family from that village who invited me to spend the night in their shack had a couple smartphones per person, bluetooth karaoke microphones(that was super fun), two smart TVs and an Xbox with a kinect(or whatever the new iteration was). Full internet access and electricity, and they lived in otherwise full undeveloped jungle a kilometer away from the 30-people village along a single road that experienced a mudslide a month previous that had no timeline for being cleared. We all recorded our dinner and karaoke together, they posted and streamed it on facebook or wherever real-time and afterwards.
Living in parts of entirely disconnected rural Afghanistan or other yet-recovered war-ravaged countries is still an option for “privacy-focused” individuals, but in about 15 years I doubt even the rural towns in those countries will be entirely excepted from blanket identity tracking.
Cameras and ID software are already affordable and become moreso literally each passing day, and the advantages to law enforcement and data brokers are already beneficial and become moreso literally each passing day.
This ironically does not eliminate privacy altogether, I believe in the “there’s so much going on and being recorded nohody is going to care if I’m smoking a joint in an alley with a camera” future. Before cameras, we were tracked by our immediate communities. In the middle camera age a decade ago(before ubiquitous digitization), it felt invasive, and now we’re past that and living in nascent transmetropolitan where everything and everyone is recorded and analyzed all the time to the point that soon nobody is going to look at you unless you are literally consecutively Jack the Ripping in plain view.
I don’t like being tracked, but it isn’t exactly a battle I have any say in and there are historical privacy policies being developed now that will shape how the future looks. If citizen rights are robust, tracking doesn’t functionally matter much more than your elderly neighbor eyeing you from the porch.
Now in the US, identity tracking is already everywhere and citizen rights have been nearly entirely eroded, so I prefer to live abroad where I at least have much more robust functional rights as a traveler.
I completely agree that everyone is being recorded almost all the time in public, but your post reminded me of the last time I signed up for insurance. They gave me a device and said just keep it in my trunk for a slight discount. I knew it was obviously a gps tracker and told the sales lady they would have to pay me like minimum $100 a month to drive around with that thing. People give away their personal driving info for a couple of cents off on their insurance.
I believe technically you can. But they will make it as inconvenient as possible. As someone who travels for work, I’ve accepted it as a necessary evil.
Legally you can opt out but that won’t stop then from telling you you can’t and refusing entry without it regardless.
Can’t speak for other countries but in the US you are allowed to opt out (for now)
Just FYI it is opt in
I’m not leaving, I’m not staying, and I’m not coming back.
It seems like you’d need to do at least one of those things.
Nope, can’t make me.
I don’t mean to presume your political leaning or anything about you or your beliefs.
But are you a white Caucasian male?
Do you presume I’m a white male because I seem to have the privilege to find this immigration database problematic rather than living with daily oppression in all sorts of other ways? Perhaps that’s true.
Personally, I’m a brown skinned long haired Native Canadian. I fluently speak English and I’m as Canadian as anyone that’s lived in this country all their lives.
I’ve also done quite a bit of traveling over the years. My wife and I have been too Europe over a dozen times, Caribbean, Asia and South America.
She’s white and always breezes through immigration anywhere. About half the time, I get held up, questioned longer and a few times taken aside to be searched.
My favorite was arriving for a transit stop in Halifax on our way to Toronto. Almost the entire 300 passenger flight was older retirees … all of them white Canadians. They all got through security, but four people were singled out to be searched … myself, a black couple and an Indian woman … we were the only ethnic looking people on the whole flight. The Indian lady was a second generation Canadian who grew up in Toronto and she gave everyone shit and berated them as they made us open up our luggage.
We delayed the flight to Toronto and when we boarded, they all looked at us like it had all been our fault.
This is the reason why I asked about your ethnic background and sex. Racial profiling is a very normal thing in security and immigration … and most people don’t notice it unless you are part of an ethnic group that is considered questionable.
You make a interesting point but unfortunately facial recognition is known for being racist
I mean, I was going to make this joke, but this kind of ruins it. Though, maybe if the joke is seen first…
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You just did you fucking racist
Considering its relevant to the discussion I would say (like OP) that’s a bit uncalled for…
Historically and currently, non-white people are much more likely to be profiled in airports - meaning that it often isn’t as easy as “scan your face here and walk through”.
If anything it’s even more privacy invasive than the “normal” procedure.
Uncalled for
