Why smiling in your passport photo is forbidden | Hacker News Reader

Why smiling in your passport photo is forbidden

travel.stackexchange.com

59 pointsnsaparanoid62 comments

The reasoning is dumb, and the concept easily subject to abuse.

If you're good at contorting your face for an extended period of time, including whilst you speak, do so for your passport photograph. Think Mr Bean or EmotionEric / http://emotioneric.com

Why would you do this?

Well I did this for my passport for several reasons, foremost being I detest the idea of facial recognition, it's an invasion of my privacy and my right to digital anonymity. For the same reason I don't have a facebook page, ask friends never to tag me in images and generally avoid photographs. Secondly because passports are archaic hangovers for an era long gone. When I travel (and I do so a fair amount) I only need my ID card to do so and mine uses a picture of me, so old and of such bad quality it's practically useless.

It's a small amusement, and when I've actually needed to use the passport, I've yet to meet a passport officer or customs officer who will actually ask "Do you really look like that all the time?" or crack up laughing. But I'm keeping hope alive.

    When I travel (and I do so a fair amount) I only need my ID card

How are you let across international borders with only ID? I was under the impression that is only possible under very specific circumstances (e.g. between some EU states). Specifically, I can't imagine you're are let in or out of the US (other than maybe to Canada and Mexico) with just an id...

You can travel freely to any EU, aspiring EU or Schengen country without need for a passport, you just need your national ID card.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Agreement

- https://www.bfm.admin.ch//bfm/en/home/themen/fza_schweiz-eu-...

I've no intention of ever travelling to the US or any nation with similar travel requirements purely because that'd require a bio-metric passport. I dislike photos as it is ...

Note that some countries (e.g. Iceland) are in Schengen but have no accepted national ID card that isn't the passport, so de-facto you need your passport to travel, even within Schengen.

I don't know if Iceland's the rare exception here or if this goes for some other countries as well.

> I don't know if Iceland's the rare exception here or if this goes for some other countries as well.

If you mean exception as an EU country with no national ID scheme: the UK, Denmark, Ireland, and Norway also don't have national ID cards.

If you meant a Schengen country with no national ID: Denmark and Norway are other Schengen countries with no national ID cards (Norway isn't in the EU but is in the EFTA).

Sadly the dream of passport-less travel in the EU is slowly being eroded by airlines demanding passports for photo ID. Although I'm a UK citizen I don't own a UK password, I refuse to pay for one when I have no desire to travel outside the EU (there's also political reasons, but I won't go into that here).

Anyway, there are some destinations I can't fly to within the UK without a passport because certain operators such as Ryan Air will only accept a passport as photo ID, which is pretty dumb. FlyBe used to have this policy but I see they've recently relented and will now even let you board with just your senior citizen bus pass :)

> certain operators such as Ryan Air will only accept a passport as photo ID

Is this some special case? I always fly with my national id rather than a passport and yes, I fly ryanair. Never had a problem with that.

Not really. They don't accept drivers licenses, so if you're flying from Ireland, your only option is a passport.

Ryan Air will accept national identity cards, except that the UK doesn't have a national identity card scheme. Also Ryan Air don't consider UK driver licenses a valid ID, even for UK citizens travelling WITHIN the UK.

You can get a Nexus card or an Enhanced Driver's License in Canada to facilitate rapid border crossings by land (though passports are still required by air or sea).

The American passport that a recently-visiting friend brought was essentially an ID card the size of a driver's license, with RFID in it and the standard passport character coding on the bottom. I'm not sure if this is something supported in all other countries (since no passport stamping), but it seemed to do okay for our land crossings.

What data does the chip actually contain? Is it an identifier linked to a database or does it actually contain your personal information?

One reason I dislike biometric passports implementing RFID is because typically most suffer from poor implementation, it's like a one stop shop for identify theft for any nefarious type within a few meters of you.

If you mean the U.S. "passport card", it's: "Valid when entering the United States from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda at land border crossings or sea ports-of-entry. Not valid for international travel by air."

http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/passports/...

I've never understood the point of the "passport card" option. I mean, I get that it's $100 difference, but never saw that as a reason to get one, and don't know why the state dept didn't just not come up with the idea and make everyone get a proper passport.

Say you live in Portland, OR. Canada is less than 300 miles away, an easy drive. Oregon doesn't offer any type of "enhanced" license valid for border crossings. (I'm not sure their licenses even meet all of the standards for domestic air travel). If you only ever travel to Canada, the passport card might make sense.

IF the only places you go to are Canada and/or Mexico, it probably makes sense for the price difference.

> I was under the impression that is only possible under very specific circumstances (e.g. between some EU states).

Obviously those 'very specific circumstances' can get you a lot of places if you live in certain European countries.

Well I didn't know the OP is in the EU & when he said "I travel a lot" I assumed he meant international travel in general.

So yeah there are a lot of countries you can see inside Europe but most of the world is still outside of the EU :)

Oh. I haven't thought of emotioneric in the longest time. Thanks for the smile.

>Well I did this for my passport for several reasons, foremost being I detest the idea of facial recognition, it's an invasion of my privacy and my right to digital anonymity.

Better get rid of those humans born with the ability.

How is an id card different from a passport? A passport is a national id booklet?

Is this a practical, answerable question based on an actual problem that you face? Are you deciding whether or not to do something based on answers to this question? It's an interesting question, but I don't see how it's in-scope for this stack exchange.

Tangent: Oh, good god. I guess I should be heartened that it's not just programmers who think this way. What a useless sentiment this is. Stackexchange is like a super smart scientist uncle who has this one weird blind spot for homeopathy or something. It's so frustrating to see this sort of comment over and over.

I wholeheartedly agree. I've seen some really good questions buried/closed prematurely because of this overzealous policing.

I'm not really sure what the other options are, though. Quora? Other web communities that are specific to whatever topic you have questions about? It's a shame, because I otherwise really like Stack Exchange's layout and mechanics as a whole (as someone mostly Googling around for existing questions/answers).

> I'm not really sure what the other options are, though. Quora?

There are various AskReddit clones, and various subreddits dedicated to culling the "best of". However, this is pretty hit or miss, and just searching for content is pretty hard.

Askreddit has become pretty much /r/tellMeStories. /r/explainlikeimfive has, unfortunately, become what you are looking for.

Right. Stackoverflow is still the best option for dozens of reasons. I love it. But the deletionism is stupid. More than that: it's stupid religion. The people who think it is necessary never provide any evidence for its effectiveness. They claim it influences future questions. Again, I have never seen a single piece of evidence that this is true. It just feels true to them, so it's true. QED.

FWIW, I got fed up with this, and I spent last month building a completely open platform for programmers to come and chat about anything. It will still have a topic+answers format, but everything is allowed - let the community vote stuff up and down. It has reputation points, but no "achievements" yet. I'm not sure those are needed.

The site design is clean and simple, no clutter. It is built with Bootstrap 3, so it looks ok on mobile. Stuff like image and video uploading works as well, with integrated video player (using ffmpeg for conversion).

It has a social-network aspect: you can connect with other members or have private conversation.

I soon plan to launch the website and I'll post the complete source code (sans passwords) on GitHub under GPL license.

If you're interested to know when it launches, please e-mail me (it's in my profile):

"Closed as not a constructive question." 32,000 views and 293 upvotes

I see it time and time again in SE sites.

The close reasons are often funny. How many times have you seen a perfectly understandable question closed as "unclear what you're asking?" It's going to be like that until they introduce a, "I don't like this question so I'm taking my ball and going home" close reason, which more closely resembles what's actually happening.

Is this a practical, answerable question based on an actual problem that you face?

Well, in this case it seems the actual problem... is your face.

This is why I all but stopped using this site to ask questions. I love the questions that SE loves to hate because they're the ones that are most informative and teach me the most. I can't ask open-ended questions about why something is the way it is, or why something works the way it does unless I know there's a concrete answer. Even then it's a battle to not have the question closed (or get it reopened!), or to explain why answers to questions x, y, and z do not sufficiently my question.

I'm still grateful to them for ridding the web of Expert Sex Change though.

Back in the day when they just took the photo you gave them and laminated it into the passport, I wondered what would happen if you printed the picture using photo reactive ink.

I used to have as a sample some ink that would break down in ultraviolet light and become transparent. The use case was things like printable visitor badges that after 24 hours of exposure to light would say "VOID" on them. Basically they had the word VOID on them, then white photosensitive ink was put over it, and the badge printer printed on top of that ink.

So my question was if you created two photos, and then printed over one with another, then after a while the picture in your passport would be different.

The challenge I never figured out was you could get this ink in black, or white, but I wasn't sure you could make a black and white print blending the inks that would pass muster. It would have to be opaque enough to cover the picture behind it.

Sadly I had to file that idea under "probably won't ever be able to know one way or another." but it might make for an interesting plot mechanism if I get around to writing a thriller.

I used to be some kind of techno-optimist which is why I chose the software-based career path that I did. But now I'm realizing that governments and corporations are actually building The Matrix, and we are all getting plugged into it whether we want it or not.

I'm having a crisis of conscience. Even things like the open source movement end up contributing to these scary bureaucracies that are destroying our freedoms. I fear for what will become of humanity over the next few decades.

So, if I smile while committing a crime, facial recognition software won't be able to identify me. Got it, Thanks!

More like they can more easily match you with your face, or match one picture to another (e.g. if someone tries to request a passport with your picture, or request your passport with their picture).

Everyone make note of this day: the Riddler is born.

Er, don't you mean the Joker?

Daaaaaaaaaaamnnn it!

Fuck, I just made bash.org didn't I? :( Maybe it's only IRC, I can only hope.

Similar to, "So, if I keep my cell phone on during take-off, I can interfere with the navigation system".

edit: Wow - why all the downvotes? It's the same kind of policy. Making your weakness "not allowed" is not fixing the weakness.

it might still be able to identify you but not in real time.

throw in sunglasses and a hat and facial recognition should fail, at least that was still true in 2001 when John Cleese tested facial recognition in BBC's The Human Face series by David Attenborough.

Is anyone unsatisfied with the "it helps with facial recognition software" response?

What part of facial recognition relies on the lack of a smile? I was hoping that would get explained here, and am disappointed that it wasn't.

I think everyone assumes it's for facial recognition...

If it were really for facial recognition, I wonder if they would ban passport pictures taken in the days after a wisdom tooth operation. Those can swell your lower face, pulling your mouth out more than usual. Hell, if facial recognition is so sensitive to changes in soft tissue like the location of the corners of your mouth, shape of your cheeks, or thickness of your lips, does gaining or losing a large amount of weight fuck it up?

I would think that they focus more on the location of facial features that are set in stone^Wbone. On that note though, could you construct lenses that change where your eyes appear to be located?

See my other answer, but the short version is it does make facial recognition software work better. I'm not sure if it's variations on the facial structure, or what, but my boss worked on the facial recognition software in the '01-'02 era, and it worked with more accuracy with no smiling.

> What part of facial recognition relies on the lack of a smile?

If current facial recognition software can't handle smiles, then you just have to remember to plaster on a creepy politician-rictus-smile while walking through airports. I also wonder how some pols get passports...

It is for facial recognition software.

I know nothing about the field, but my assumption would be that you need a plain base to work from. That way you start with a known value and you compare from the base to the image you're trying to match.

If you had a smiling photo as the base, and you're trying to match a photo where the person is frowning, that must be that much harder to work out.

Remember that smiling changes not on the mouth but the eyes as well. I would guess that eye shape is a key factor in making facial recognition work.

For the record, I am favor of facial recognition for identity checks with passports. It means I can use the automated immigration processing queues, which are much, much faster than standing in a line waiting for a guy to ask you a couple of benign questions and stamp your passport.

Eye shape is good in NIR images, otherwise in VL images it not as big a factor.

It is for automated real time facial recognition.

Watch BBC's The Human Face presented by John Cleese and Elizabeth Hurley, it is from 2001 but it has a part on facial recognition by machines.

TL:DR - Apparently, one of the reasons for it is so facial recognition software works better, other constraints are defined in ISO/IEC 19794.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=markhacker

Also travelhacker and travelstacker. Probably more.

Tagged URLs. See the /101?

I can't answer this on the site, but my boss claims that he was partially responsible for this. He worked with the company doing facial recognition software to hunting down kiddie porn makers, which was (I think) moved into terrorism detection (this is in the 2001-2002 timeframe). They couldn't get the facial recognition to work with enough accuracy with anything but a blank facial expression.

So if I smile daily and everywhere my face would be more difficult to recognise and track?

You will not be smiling when you are getting interrogated at the airport security so to match your face 100% with your passport photo they don't want you to smile :-)

Is it just me or is the top voted answer not an answer?

Q: "Why should cows be colored in blue?"

A: Because document ZOIU-123497 says cows should be colored in blue.

Quit stalling and turn in your damn blue cow sheets already.

Because they don't everyone to know how happy you were the day you knew that, soon enough, you'd be leaving.

> 1.9. Coverings, hair, headdress, hats, scarfs, head bands, bandanas or facial ornamentation which obscure the face, are not permitted (except for religious […] reasons).

I can't wait for someone to abuse this. I hear some tattoos tend to disrupt facial recognition…

Get one of those temporary tattoos that fade away after a couple of weeks

This was in the news when it was announced that you couldn't smile in ID photos. I thought it was common knowledge.

FWIW, I am smiling on my US passport issued in 2005 and haven't had any issues.

Because smiling makes people’s faces less, rather than more, recognizable.

tl;dr anyone?

Facial recognition requires a closed mouth. Standards organizations are adopting rules that make facial recognition possible.

This, I think the width of your mouth is a data-point which is stupid and exploitable, after all you can contort your mouth in a dozen ways without opening it or smiling (see my other post in this thread).

And that doesn't even take into account the use of things like lipstick to make your mouth seem wider ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com