When you go through immigration, sometimes the customs officer will hold up your passport and look at the photo on it and compare it against your face. Unless you’ve recently undergone major plastic surgery or if you’re using a forgery, chances are you might not have anything to worry about.However recently in a bid to help cut down on imposters, the DC Dulles airport has recently launched an experiment in which your photo will be taken at immigration and will be applied to facial recognition software to determine if you really are who you say you are. Naturally this has not gone down well with privacy advocates who feel like it could create unforeseen risks.
According to Jake Laperruque, a fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology who spoke with the folks at Motherboard, “Here we have a program where individuals are not suspected of wrongdoing and are engaged in routine behavior, and they are being required to submit a piece of biometric data that could identify them later and that’s going to be retained. That’s definitely a dark road to be going down with a lot of potential for abuse.”
This experiment is said to last for the next 19 months in which photos will only be collected and stored for 60-90 days. The photos are also expected to be deleted from storage once the experiment has concluded unless they are part of a criminal investigation, according to the Customs and Border Protection.
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