I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m a law abiding citizen of $other_country and at this point I wouldn’t touch the US with a very long pole. Just doesn’t seem worth it
The other countries I’ve traveled to just adopted with broadly without any discussion of privacy, just a “look how convenient this is!!”
Facial recognition is the use of the same technology to match a picture of your face to pictures in some face picture database in order to identify you, without the need of a passport or other photographic id. As the Wired article points out, this use case has a very high rate of failure "in the wild", i.e. with natural lighting conditions, varied body postures and facial accessories etc. There are a few police forces in certain countries that have adopted this tech, but it's not as widely deployed as facial verification.
The article above is complaining about the use of facial recognition. It's a bit confusing because the article keeps using the term "verification" as does the Wired article, but there's a clear description of matching a picture taken on the street to faces in a "database", and there's no mention of using the tech to match a person to the photo on their id, so that's facial recognition, not verification.
There's a serious issue of invasion of privacy from unchecked use of facial recognition. Unfortunately most people are not going to care much, like they didn't care much when e.g. the UK installed surveilance cameras [2] all over the place, and like they don't care much when Meta, Google, Amazon, and everyone else vacuums up their online behavioural patterns for targeted advertisement etc.
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[1] Twitter thread, can't find it now.
[2] Or so-called CCTV. Please excuse a long-ago Metal Gear Solid player a small terminological transgression.
There are many countries now that don't require a passport to enter - you can simply get a facial scan.
And even beyond that, the countries that do take a photo and compare with your passport and absolutely storing that photo and using it for whatever purpose they might have laid out.
So if the issue is that your privacy is being threatened due to a stored photo of you - that happens whether it's facial recognition or facial verification.
You're straw-manning here. The issue isn't privacy in a vacuum. The issue is very directly privacy in the context of the current US government being undeniably and intentionally malicious in a way that few countries anywhere in the world currently are. @YeGoblynQueenne indicates as much by saying "At the very least, in an EU country (and also the UK) you can ...".
The US government currently doesn't give a shit about the law or human rights in ways that are both completely unprecedented and very violent. People have concrete reason to fear the US government right now. That's what the article is about, not merely privacy on its own.
> There are many countries now that don't require a passport to enter - you can simply get a facial scan.
Name all the ones that violently assault and kill people in the street and imprison people for weeks or months or even years without formal charges and ignore court orders to release people who are being illegally imprisoned and then only later comply with the law after injurious delays with the most malicious interpretations if ever.
I'm not sure you know what "strawmanning" is.
You're making extraordinary claims with no evidence. That seems more like strawmanning.
> Name all the ones that violently assault and kill people in the street and imprison people for weeks or months or even years without formal charges
Huh? If you're talking about enforcing immigration laws, they all do. It's the US that is the odd outlier that doesn't enforce immigration laws.
It's very clear that you don't converse honestly in good faith when you choose to draw a false equivalence between "violently assault and kill people in the street and imprison people for weeks or months or even years without formal charges" and a mealy-mouthed "enforcing immigration laws". We're done here.
My country isn't perfect but at least we keep the racists, fascists and religious nut cases in line.
> "I don't feel safe entering the US anymore"
> "Other countries do facial recognition too"
You see how the two statements are not directly linked.
Article is about facial recognition.
Comments says "I'm scared to go to the US because of...<article>"
I response with a comment about the facial recognition and how every other country I've been to does it, but for some bizarre reason, it's not those countries OP is worried about, it's the US.
It's cognitive dissonance.
Usually big sport events are used to improve optics for authoritarian regimes, often outbidding well-functioning democracies. Quatar, China, Russia, Nazi Germany [1] to name a few. I think the world cup football is a welcome event, as it gives some 'normalcy' to the US regime, and legitimacy to their policies. It is interesting to study the history around [1], as not many things have changed how people approach these kinds of dilemmas.
Bush-Rove-Schwarzegnegger: https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/10/06/the-bush-rove-schwar... :
> According to [...], Rove’s grandfather was Karl Heinz Roverer, the Gauleiter of Oldenburg. Roverer was Reich-Statthalter—Nazi State Party Chairman—for his region. He was also a partner and senior engineer in the Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo A. G. engineering firm, which built the Birkenau death camp, at which tens of thousands of [...]
Oh, also Rove and Kenneth Lay of the Enron deregulatory debacle that put California hospitals in rolling blackouts in the dark.
vegas empty https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=Vegas+e...
They forced the US into trillions of dollars of debt by cutting taxes and starting wars.
They have not paid the bills for the wars that they started and debt-financed.
"Starve the beast" (Reagan/Bush, Bush, Trump): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
LIV Golf
"From Infiltrating Wikipedia to Paying Trump Millions in Golf Deals, Saudis Whitewash Rights Record" (2023) https://www.democracynow.org/2023/1/17/saudi_arabia_wikipedi... :
> LIV has paid millions to golf resorts owned by Donald Trump, who has publicly supported the new league which is attempting to compete with the PGA.
Trump takes direct payments from SA for Liv golf.
"Analysis: The real reason Donald Trump is on board with LIV Golf" https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/politics/donald-trump-liv-gol... quoting a presidential masto-toot:
> "All of those golfers that remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year,” Trump wrote. “If you don’t take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.”