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by gruez
543 days ago
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>but got squicked out about the heuristics the system (might) run through before it let me through. I think you're overestimating how sophisticated the system is. Most online check-in processes require you to input your passport details. In-person check-in probably results in the gate agent doing something similar. If the arrival airport has this information, it's pretty easy to look up the corresponding face on file (that you provided when you applied for a passport), and use that to generate a list of faces you need to match against. From there, it's only a matter of matching a given face to a face in that set. Moreover, given that arrivals are staggered, that set is going to be relatively small. A wide-body aircraft holds around 300 passengers. If 3 of them arrive at the same time, to the same passport control point, that's only around 1000 faces to match against. That's far easier to do than trying to match against all faces in the entire country, for instance. |
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It's not inconceivable, however, that the system connects to whatever other dossier(s) have been built against my identity. Even before we consider ML facial recognition by public cameras (probably not yet possible at scale?), the Singaporean SIM card I bought was connected to my passport, which gives them my location: both absolute and relative to anyone I might have spent time around.
I mean, I was a normal tourist, and not doing anything shady whilst I was there, but... False positives exist, and I wouldn't have wanted to have been pulled out of the queue for questioning about something I couldn't possibly have explained.
Singaporeans seem to have a different point of view about surveillance, however. Even the (fairly low-key) human rights activist I chatted with thought it was all great, and said something along the lines of "the cameras keep us safe". "Privacy" as we tend to think about it on this board may be a mainly Anglo-Saxon concern, for what that's worth.