Original question by @wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
For those of you who travel in the united states, you’ll know they now have facial recognition scans when checking your id. You can opt out by telling them you don’t want to take the picture. I do every time, but I wonder what the point of the scan is if you can just opt out. That given, why do you think they do it? What prevents them from forcing you to do it?
To those of you who live outside of the united states, have you seen a similar increase in security at your airports?
Yes.
Even if it didn’t explicitly stop my biometric data from being taken and transferred to a government database every single time I fly, it would be a vote against the system itself existing. The whole reason they are allowing people to opt out right now is to test how acceptable it is to people, to hopefully make it mandatory given too little pushback from the public.
Opting out doesn’t just protect your biometric data now, it protects everyone in the future from having their biometric data taken from them without a choice if this system is allowed to spread unopposed.