My question is does opt out keep them from imaging your id in any way? Because my id already has my photo.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Privacy
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Why would you defend this?
We trust an enormous amount of data to the federal government, and until recently, that privacy risk was mitigated by the fact that the branches did not automatically share data with each other.
Now, they are trying to vacuum it all up, and increase the power of the government.
Why should the federal government have my driver's license photo anyway? That's through the state. And even if they did, why should I give them easy access to an updated photo of me, cross referenced with my name and identity?
If the answer is it speeds up the TSA's job and makes them more accurate, I don't think that's a compelling enough reason for me personally to give up that little bit of privacy.
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No my face is not public data. While I may choose to appear in public with my face, if a private party wants to use my likeness, in advertising for example, they have to get my consent. It's not in the public domain, unless I'm a celebrity. I see no reason why we should just roll over and allow anyone to use our faces for any purposes without contesting it.
If some government spy wants to make a dossier on me, it would be easy to hire a photographer to take a recent photo. But they can't do this on a large scale. What they can do is pay a company that already has a model of my face, which I object to, and then they can try to run facial recognition algorithms on anyone who turns out at a demonstration, for instance.
I can only mitigate the threat of public photos of myself so much, like not having photos on social media or LinkedIn. Maybe someday I'll be able to opt myself out of facial recognition databases.
Choosing not to let the TSA routinely take a high quality photo of my face is just a small way to mitigate against how many facial recognition databases I'm in, and how high quality their models are.
If any of this is wrong I would be glad to be corrected.
The fact that you don’t like your face being public data changes nothing about whether or not it actually is public data.
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In my opinion, the privacy violation would be taking my biometric data without my consent (e.g. facial geometry, fingerprint, blood, dna/genetics, etc.) While yes my face is public, I'd rather not give them a high-res facial geometry map that gets fast-tracked directly to a database.
Making it harder for them makes them put in the effort to track or profile people which does not eliminate the problem, but does make it more difficult and thus more resource consuming for them, especially if many people do the same
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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.
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.
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