this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Privacy
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This is basically fear mongering. You're worried about what they might do rather than what they are doing, which is not keeping the pics taken at kiosks. This is even mentioned in the article.
I'd certainly be worried about any plans they have, but skipping the pics now isn't doing anything for either party unless you don't believe what they say. Which is fair enough, but you'd need to provide a reason to doubt it.
Do you have proof of that? I personally don't trust what law enforcement says. They have already proven themselves incompetent and to have no respect for the law, what more reason do I need to not trust them?
Even if I do believe them, making things inconvenient for the police is just a small way for me to get back at them for making my life inconvenient. If enough people push back and slow TSA to a crawl, they'll reconsider the policy.
The current admin is utilizing IRS data for deportation efforts and the USPS for data collection in furtherance of those same efforts. Why would collection of facial recognition data from the TSA be any different?
The TSA site specifically says that the photos are not stored. AI training data generated from the "live" photo(s) they take would be just as useful to them for the things people should be worried about and there's no mention of them not storing that data.
Is that even something they do though? Or just another "but they could" argument?
It's a "but they could." The fact they are doing the comparison means there's some sort of machine learning/AI going on which would have to generate some sort of dataset to function. So if they weren't going to store any of that data they could say so instead of only saying "photos" won't be stored.
The site does later say "Biometrics are not used for surveillance – Facial recognition technology is solely used to automate the current manual ID credential checking process and will not be used for surveillance or any law enforcement purpose." (so they do seems to understand the difference between "photos" and "biometrics") but things can change and the possible existence of such data would make it much easier to end up legally/illegally being used for such things than if it doesn't exist.
You don't need to provide a reason, you just have to say you choose to opt out.
Frankly with how easily this administration attempts to skirt the law, and defy judges that tell them to knock it off, I would not trust that the TSA is always deleting the photos that they're supposed to.