No not always, only recently.
> I don't really see what the problem would be here?
You’re kidding right? There’s multiple privacy problems. Sounds like you either benefit from mass surveillance or have been conditioned to it.
No, not kidding.
There's a legitimate government interest in identifying people entering and leaving a country. This isn't Facebook, or even cameras on street corners -- this is a government responsible for enforcing legitimate immigration policies at a legitimate location (the border) for a wide variety of reasons (safety, economic, etc.), which absolutely requires knowing who is who.
I don't know any serious thinkers who claim otherwise.
And I don't see a particularly big difference between getting my photo taken for official ID's every few years (passport, driver's license, visas, etc.) and having it taken when I need to prove my identity with one of those.
The government already has photos of me. They already know my flight. How could it possibly affect my privacy that they also have a photo of me when I get on the plane?
I'm just not seeing it.
(Unless you're opposed to the whole concept of passports and photo ID's in general, but that would be a pretty radical position.)
And I'd wager the reason they're doing this is because while a human can make a decent determination of whether the photo matches the person in front of them, computers need a larger sample to get the error rate low enough for broad use. That's great for CBP and airlines that can employ fewer personnel, and great for travelers who can breeze throughª boarding and customs. But imagine how it will go when you are one of those 0.1% errors and the system refuses to let you in.
ªassuming companies/govts decide to increase throughput instead of decreasing cost, or that it's such an improvement that it can do both.
Wasting taxpayer money in photo storage is a laugh. That isn’t the same category of argument as the idea that is is “overreach.”
It would be entirely possible to have a benevolent dictator, he might think he is doing everything for the benefit of the people - and he might even be right. This situation is fine, the issue is what happens when that dictator dies.
Similarly with mass surveillance, if used with restraint and for the right reasons it could be completely fine. The problem is what happens if the situation changes, there is now a massively powerful tool available with little recourse for change.
I think the issue is not the situation as it is _now_, it's the risk potential it inherently has that is terrifying.
You lost me at this straw man. You are tossing around nebulous and vague concerns. Would it be fair to say your concern is potential abuse of your photos by a government entity?
It's fair to say my concern is potential abuse of any system in a fluctuating context.
It's not just the picture, it's the databases and the veracity of mass data base mining that can come from it.
To better explain:
Right now powerful entities have files on me. My actives. And yours. The collection, use and sharing of these files between these powerful entities violate our rights, even if only in intent (though arguably more)
Right now these files are mostly loosely created, probabilistic based associations.
If you've ever used any ID verification systems, you'd understand this (think lexisnexis)
So, they sort of know, but don't fully. Good. Even if these entities have shown the desire to violate my rights, they can't do it well because of issues related to data collection. I like that.
So the way I see these advancements is... great, now these entities are getting mass fed pictures that are 99.999% a correct association. This could be used for facial recognition software tie ins to say, CCTV systems. As stated, you need more than one picture to increase accuracy.
I don't want them to have it.
Right now, their interest (in violating my rights for profit and power) and my interest (in staking claim to the rights my forebearers fought for) are oposite.
However your concern about building a face database is valid. Note that China somehow can do it with only your Wechat profile. Maybe they are better at ML than the US. They are already automatically fining jaywalkers by face ID. And I assume worse.
Easy to say. How about evidence. I offer all the evidence from Snowden and other whistle blowers to beg the contrary.
To me, it's very obvious unless you are intentionally not wanting to see it.
Notice I said if only in intent, I'm not here to split hairs on legalese. Intent in things like the Fourth Amendment to me is very clear.
I live in an area where when I go for weekend drives, I have to stop at border patrol check points where I am forced to stop and answer officer's questions. I'm not even traveling between states and I'm over 50 miles from the boarder in those points.
Trust me, I understand the legalese they use to justify it. They define a border zone that I think goes a hundred or two miles in land, which means it covers something like 70% of major American metro areas and allows the gov to basically conduct illegal searches by creating a loop hole.
But that is the point. My rights are routinely violated with impunity. People who have stood up to this get literally crushed. Clear whistle blowers are declared spies. It's them working to undermine my rights. Rights that people literally died so I could have. I think it's wrong to let those rights go. It's why I support things like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Would your argument against street corner recognition systems have been different before and after facial recognition was required at the border?
You mention that having your photo taken at passport control is “pretty normal”. Do you remember when it was not? Would you be more concerned if we had gone straight from a situation where no pictures were taken, to rolling out a facial recognition system at the border?
Government does not already have photos of all individuals who cross street corners (there is no legal requirement to have ID) and government does not record a list of names of each person who crosses the street. So, cameras at street corners have a much larger delta - between no photos and photos and between no internal location records and having internal location records.
This is nothing new, only new for people that don’t live near a physical border in the US.
The government clearly has missed a few people coming in and out on Visas. What is a way better than the current border protection method that also protects everyone’s privacy?
This reeks to me of another situation where we're trying to put the cat back in the bag, and that has basically never worked (except maybe nuclear disarmament, and even then... barely, and largely because the capital costs are so extreme).
Surveillance tech is cheap and widely available and will only continue to move in that direction. Attempting to make sure no one has a photo of you without your consent seems hilariously impossible to me. Focus on the outcomes instead.
For example road side license plate readers sound cheap, but unless a cop is next to it it’s really hard to catch the car that tripped one.
But the London cops have been caught falsely accusing, arresting and holding people for weeks based on facial recognition (based on both wrongly made identifications, and wrong input pictures).
People have had their own medical files used against them in court by youth services and mental health services departments of their own governments.
People have been convicted based on factually incorrect information entered into police databases, then corrected in one place, but not the other.
The government keeps getting caught using privacy laws in ways not intended: for instance, to hide the identity of cops that beat up someone for racist reasons, preventing them from getting sued.
IRS has access to almost all databases. From medical files to bank statements. What they use it for ...
We all know WHO needs to be prevented from merging databases to increase people's safety. And it's not Facebook, it's the police, health and government departments. We need a right to delete any information about yourself AND ALL LINKED AND COPIED VERSIONS in all government database, and all information sharing needs to be "default deny". No government department has any business whatsoever in your medical files. All information provided by the government in court needs to be subject to invalidation by counter-experts. And it should be default practice to have all government information and copies of it that involves any person directly or indirectly "time-out". And to prevent government abuse of privacy laws, anyone working for government needs to be identified on request in any record that involves that person acting in any official capacity.
Some people don't mind these kinds of surveillance. You might staunchly disagree but you have to accept that it's a valid position.
What if I don't accept it?
I don't know of anyone who likes sticking needles in themselves (aside from addicts, but that's another story), only those who understand the value of what's in them (I suppose that addicts would fall into that category, too.)
I distinctly remember my mom explaining why I was about to get stabbed with needles when I was four. I didn't mind.
Is it valid?
At some point we have to determine what is a minimum acceptable level of cohesiveness in though to take someone seriously.
I'm not saying anti-privacy people are in such extreme, but I don't like the 'everything a valid position in the post-modern relativist world'. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and some people might draw it further in or further out. But we all do it.