this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
44 points (89.3% liked)

Privacy

7771 readers
2 users here now

A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy

Rules:

  1. Be civil
  2. No spam posting
  3. Keep posts on-topic
  4. No trolling

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
iopq@lemmy.world
44
Creepy US immigration welcome (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 5 days ago by trailee@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.world
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

US citizen here. I recently returned from my first international travel in a few years, and I was unpleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get back into the country.

In the returning citizens line, everyone was directed by an officer to one of three tablets each on a stand about 3-4 feet high. You stuck your face in the right spot for the camera and the tablet turned green. And that was it, free to go. No conversation with a human about where you went, no human verifying your passport, no need for the passport at all. Just a face scan (presumably matching a database of digitized passport photos) and you’re done.

Makes me wonder what the bar is for various local law enforcement or different federal agencies to get access to the database and hook in with surveillance cameras.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

Oh you’ve misread my mentality. I’m very concerned about all of the terrible things happening in the country and I have plenty of friends in marginalized groups to believe.

The point of this post was actually about how creepy it is that USCIS has fully embraced facial recognition and feels it has a sufficiently low error rate to use it with no secondary validation for approving citizen reentry (at least at airports where all passengers are sufficiently well off to afford plane tickets). That gives a lot of credibility to otherwise unsubstantiated concerns about government surveillance and the consequences thereof.