I use the ‘smart’ gates at Melbourne regularly. You insert your passport, stand in front of a camera, and one assumes that your current photograph is compared to that of your passport. If they’re the same, you pass.

I fail to see the privacy implications. I’m already giving someone my passport details – I must do that to enter or exit the country. That passport already contains my photograph. What privacy am I losing by having my photograph taken at the airport?

I say this as a very privacy-conscious individual. I block ads, don’t use Facebook, etc. I fail to see the further loss of privacy in this case, over and above the mandatory scanning of my passport.

This may be true but the end game for governments is to have facial recognition everywhere. They start at the airport because "it doesn't matter, you are already giving your info out" and then we become OK with the idea so they start rolling it out for public transport and "it doesn't matter, you already do this every time you fly"

It seems to me that the only way to resist is to take a very hard rejection of facial recognition entirely in any situation.

> It seems to me that the only way to resist is to take a very hard rejection of facial recognition entirely in any situation.

Realistically the only way to resist is to develop an informed, engaged populace. There's a huge gulf between "facial recognition for crossing international borders" and "facial recognition for getting on the subway" - the former is obviously beneficial and the latter is obviously a massive overreach.

The idea that one will inevitably follow the other is only really plausible because of the public's apathy, and it leads to situations where we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I would argue against the first being obviously beneficial. The downsides of having such a system in place in my opinion outweighs any current or foreseeable benefit. One step further, I have yet to hear of a scenario where facial recognition would be a positive application. In my opinion the complete rejection is the right approach when it comes to facial recognition. Being able to automatically identify a person without them noticing or being able to prevent the identification in the future is in its very core dystopian. Its an application to end privacy, no different to the old scifi idea of getting a remotely readable identification chip implanted at birth. With the difference of the hypothetical chance to remove your scifi chip surgically. With facial identification the only realistic option is plastic surgery. We were lucky for a while that the technology wasnt ready yet, but it is getting more and more practical to utilize.

Its unfortunate that the idea of privacy is in such a downhill spiral, but the much more daunting question is, if privacy can so easily be abandoned, how will other stuff, like freedom of thought be treated in the future? What happens if technological development of surveillance could catch up some day? We are currently living in a society where no matter how horrific the methods, there are some who will find justifications to utilize them on other people. If the charges are heinous enough, human rights go out of the window. You only have to think of torture and look as far as Guantanamo. Differently put, in a society that preserves samples of eradicated plagues for possible future military uses and has no quarrels of threatening to torture the kids of enemy combatants, the research into and work on offensive capabilities with disastrous capabilities, like I would argue facial recognition is, is morally reprehensible.

I believe "facial recognition for crossing an international border" is an obvious benefit because, look, the world is not all sunshine and daisies and it's important that we're able to validate that a person going from one country to another is who they say they are.

You seem to be operating under the core assumption that because we as a society allow facial recognition in that situation it will inevitably expand to others, and that's exactly the point I was trying to make in the first place. If an educated and well-informed populace says "no, we will not allow this technology to be used outside of these specific circumstances" and then enforces that position at the ballot box, there won't be a problem. Unfortunately most people just don't care, and no amount of technological backtracking will fix that.

In other words, don't worry about the tech; worry about the people that make the tech matter.

I understand your point about the responsibility of a democracy but I do worry about the tech, I would also be alarmed if someone developed a biological weapon to extinct humanity, even if the usage was controlled by a democratic mechanism. Just dont develop such dangerous technologies with no positive use case. Dangerous being the combination of efficiency and scale-ability.

The argument also assumes that we will continue have democratic systems and the population not voting for such systems to be implemented. The reality is what ever means and information we currently entrust to governments later versions will also have access to. Not to mention the export of these technologies to "friendly" dictatorships. Its the old problem of census data in the Netherlands. They had extremely detailed census data involving peoples religious beliefs before the Nazis invaded and with the data available the persecution of Jews was extremely efficient. The resistance targeted the locations of these datasets but it didnt work good enough.

I also dont see how international borders need anything more then fingerprints. They are also far more accurate and reliable. Facial recognition has the only added benefit of being usable without the effected people noticing. Thats not a positive characteristic.

To come back to the central argument, we do already have other means of identifying people and facial recognition only differs in a few core issues from existing mechanics. The core characteristics of facial recognition are

* No need for a cooperative, consenting subject

* Not alerting the subject being identified and no protection against being identified without noticing

* Unchangeable identification characteristic

We already have reliable easy to use systems for characteristic 1 and 3, fingerprints, and I see how there might be a need for such systems at specific locations. For example at a police station or border checkpoints.

Then we have facial recognition which is a lot less accurate and its only additional benefit is point 2. Point 2 however has no positive use cases, its a purely totalitarian instrument aimed at its scale-ability. For not only being used in specific places but everywhere. You cant even make the argument which makes nuclear weapons a worthwhile technology to have, the possible usage for war against a foreign aggressor. Facial recognition is only beneficial to keep a population suppressed.

>There's a huge gulf between "facial recognition for crossing international borders" and "facial recognition for getting on the subway" - the former is obviously beneficial and the latter is obviously a massive overreach.

The same was said about the TSA searching people boarding aircraft, but then that moved to people in train stations, greyhound stations etc. being searched. Overreach is commonplace.

Passport scanners at the airports are highly regulated. Facial recognition is not.

This is the airline collecting your biometrics — a completely different entity from the border control that usually checks your passport.

You insert your passport and that should be it. Border control has already checked your identity. Afterwards, your photo was taken by the airline in order to "verify you".

Granted, airlines could get your photograph in a myriad of ways, but this system makes it as convenient for them as it can get.

You're talking about different things here. The Australian "smart" gates mentioned by the previous poster are border control, and they work by validating a picture your face against the picture in your passport.

YMMV, but I actually find using the smart gates much less invasive than dealing with human immigration officers. The gates do exactly one thing and that's that, whereas with officials there's always an uncomfortable "guilty until proven innocent" feeling (where are you going? where are you coming from?) coupled with the knowledge that borders are largely civil rights free zones, even for citizens.

The bio-metric data is not discarded but collected somewhere in a database, it could be abused in a few years or it could be leaked and now hackers have it,

I think it would be fair if the system would scan your passport , scan you, confirm the identity but not store your biometric data.

Those single shot pictures track facial changes over time - and give additional data points for facial recognition.