TSA says this is an optional program for travelers on domestic flights, while some foreign nationals may have to participate to be allowed on international flights.
Theoretically, there should be visible signage that notifies travelers they can proceed through airport security without doing the facial scan. In reality, not everyone will see the sign ― and it might not be in a language that a traveler understands.
I am one of the travelers who’s been agreeing to get my face scanned in airport security lines for years. But amid alarming reports of travelers experiencing bad treatment from border control officials, I’m reconsidering whether I should be submitting a face scan so easily to the U.S. government.
Surveillance is a slippery slope
I see a lot of people who see cameras and other surveillance tools as a source of comfort. What they don’t realize is how quickly those things can be used against them.
I loathe going to a house when I can see they’ve got a Ring or another door camera. And the shitty part is, I can’t ask the owner to turn it off while I pick up my <insert local equivalent of Craig’s List or whatever here> item because they’ll jump to assuming that I’m dodgyor going to do something bad to them rather than the door camera service they’re using being dodgy as hell and I just don’t want to be data mined by Jeff Bezos. (Or that maybe I just don’t consent to some random stranger recording me)
I really think if someone made a decentralised potentially federated network that pulls the data from every publicly available security camera on the internet and builds a database of facial recognition that would be sufficiently terrifying to get some people to stand against it.