Technology

Which exceptions?

How did you get into TSA Pre without providing fingerprints? I tried once, and they strictly refused to let me apply because I wouldn't give fingerprints.

Clear is now a TSA “vendor” for the precheck process. The machines they use for the sign up process - at least the airport I was at - don’t have the eye scanning camera in the kiosk.

The Clear representative I was asking questions of had said they don’t require eye scans for Clear, though that is the default. People can ask to use just fingerprints, which he said does disrupt the terminal process as the agents don’t think to ask if fingerprints were what was registered when the eye scans fail.

I am not advocating for Clear. I refuse to use them. I simply do want to call out that they are one of 3 who handle the process for the TSA now. People do have a choice of which of the three to use.

I'm sure the government would never let biometric data be compromised. Right?

There's no way my ID photo would work for facial recognition. I don't plan on giving them anything new before I'm forced to

I have global entry, so they already have my biometric data. I'd love to not here scanned, but this point it wouldn't be anything they didn't already have.

Put your foot down everywhere then -- it's a fallacy to think that it's not worth it to resist data harvesting because it already gets collected "everywhere" anyway, take one step at a time to make it harder and harder. Opting out of this is just one step.

It's the only real way to push back that other folks will notice if enough of us do it.

Last time I went through DC a few weeks ago they were using these. I saw a sign saying you're welcome to opt out. Nobody even questioned what they were doing and were just going along. When it was my turn I politely said I'd rather not do the scan. Dude just glanced at my ID and waved me through. The next few folks behind me blinked and said they didn't want the scan either. If enough people push back it can at least maybe slow down the normalization of constant surveillance.

They'll always win because they can just prevent you from flying.

I tried to refuse the face scan and they looked at me like I just grew eye stalks. After a long pause, I said never mind I need to catch this flight, let's do it.

It's not a hill I'm willing to die on, even though I'm disappointed with the practice.

That's the fun part about the war for privacy. We have already lost and if you make a big deal about it they're just going to make your life hell!

I still opt out of those scans to this day. Why stop?

I used to work for a company that did various kinds of biometric recognition. I unfortunately was paraded past these cameras many times for testing purposes, so my face was compromised many moons ago.

We had two kinds of products we installed in airports. When looking at large crowds most airports wanted cameras that would monitor the flow of traffic, determining if there were any bottlenecks causing people to arrive at their gate (or baggage claim) after their luggage.

The other product was facial recognition for identification purposes. These are the machines you have to stand right next to. There are various legal reasons airports did not want to use any crowd-level cameras for identification. They hadn't obtained consent, but also, the low resolution per face would lead to many more false positives. It was also too costly.

But we did have high def cameras installed in strategic locations at large music halls. These private companies were less concerned with privacy and more concerned with keeping banned individuals out of their property. In those cases, we registered faces of people who were kicked out for various reasons and ignored all other faces.

My point I guess is twofold: first, you might not be facially tracked in as many places as you think you are. Second, eventually you will be and there's not a whole lot we can do to stop it. For many years, Target has identified people with their payment card, used facial recognition to detect when they return to the store, and used crowd tracking to see where in the store you go (and sometimes they have even changed ad displays based on the demographics of people standing nearby).

Mostly, you will be identified and tracked when there is financial incentive to do so.

Sounds fishy to me.

I went vacationing in another country and it was kinda uncomfortable being scanned by cameras, then scanning my passport, then moving across country lines and getting cameras and another scanning of my passport.

Fuck calming down. That's how we got into this mess in the first place. People are to complacent with privacy. Anyone that thinks this attitude won't lead to terrible things is a fool.