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Q: Is China setting a precedent with Finger print scans?
If facial recognition was not enough now we will have our finger prints taken too.
Do you think other country's will follow suit?
will this make getting to the plane on time more difficult?
I guess I will find out this week for myself
10 years 41 weeks ago in Transport & Travel - China
I have no problem with biometrics - retina scans and/or fingerprinting or even DNA profiling. Yes, they can be used for nefarious purposes but it also makes it easier to prove innocence. Now, microchip implants would be something that I'd definitely rally against.
Scandinavian:
Why. Our dog has an ID chip. If he walks through a passport check in Europe the passport officer goes "BEEP" and that is it. Never any discussion about if the haircut has changed too much since passport photo was taken, never have to take of sunglasses etc.
quyen:
yeah, except embedded chips ARE the next step. It's already in trial, bit by bit, our freedoms will be eroded
* Precedent.
Sorry.
Just trying to be of help.
The UK already takes finger-prints of foreigners.
CARLGODWIN1983:
It's for immigrants, Phil. It's relatively new, I believe.
As others have said, we have bio-metric passports now too.
I don't actually see this as too much of a problem. If it makes it easier and quicker to pass through Luohu, I will even support it.
My passport has a digital version of my fingerprints. Should make it faster if you have a digital fingerprint embedded in the passport and a fingerprint reader. The responsibility of determining that the passport does in fact belong to the person holding it will be moved from person to machine.
The passport checks in some countries are insane, China being one of them. Oh how I enjoy the 2 hours it takes to walk the 500 meters from Zhuhai to Macau just because some passport dude needs to count all stamps, check each page, count the pages etc. If only it was digital, I am sure their computer knows how many stamps are in my passport.
All EU/Schengen countries passports are biometric
Scandinavian:
Correction, all Schengen countries (the Brits are not part of Schengen) have them.
Ah the British Island, a nation with carpet around the potty.
Malaysia takes fingerprints and has done since 2010, i'm sure there is a lot of countries that do , TBH i surprised its took china this long to implement it, before if you got in to trouble here you could simply change your passport get new passport number and come back into china,
sam239:
I've been in and out of Malaysia at least 5 times in the past year. Never had my fingerprints done. I always entered by land from Thailand, they had the fingerprint machines at the immigration desk but never asked for fingerprints. Korea is the only Asian country I've been to that consistently does fingerprints.
Not by a long shot--freaking Cambodia has them.
sam239:
Probably due to its reputation as a place for people on the lam to go and hide out.
The US has also had biometrics for quite a few years - eyes and fingerprints.
However, my home and its closest neighbour (NZ) do not.
Personally, I fear this trend! And I especially fear the complacence that people have with it.
I have a right to a certain amount of privacy and freedom in the world - and governments have been taking those rights away piece by piece... with very little said in protest.
Given recent (and not so recent) events both covert and overt done by various governments around the world, do you really want them having even more information on your movements??? How do you feel about real-name web-posts?? How about having every single phonecall or text message being copied to a server, with complete details of who sent it (you) and who received it (who you messaged/called). It's obviously not that much of a slippery slope, given that there's already the technology in place to monitor such things (such as your emails...).
Less power to the governments, I say!!!
Sidicas:
Supposedly, only for people who have a convicted criminal history.
UK was there years ago... and they made me fly all the way around the world and back for the privilege
To be honest, I don't like it at all. It makes it a lot easier for police to arrest and prosecute anybody that they want. Just go into their PCs there, copy some foreigner's fingerprint record into their "evidence of X crime" file and then go arrest you for a crime you didn't commit. The concept of fingerprints somehow "proving innocence" is absolutely wrong and dangerously incorrect. If anything, it makes it a lot easier to throw any arbitrary person in jail.
I think this will probably be the tipping point where I leave China and don't come back. If they want to check whether people are criminals or not, there are plenty of proper channels to do that without the need to keep people's fingerprints. These channels can be tapped at the time of Visa application.
Fingerprints are something that you, and you alone, should be able to reproduce and have a record of. It's one of the few things that you can use to clear you of a crime. When any government keeps a digital copy of such fingerprints, you're just a copy&paste operation on a computer away from going to jail for a long time for something you never did.
When the day comes that a government official wants to pass the blame onto somebody else, they just slip money under the table to the police department and they start copy&pasting away.
They might not have fingerprints of the poor Chinese people in rural towns, but they'll have yours!
IMO, the risk of being made some government official's scapegoat is not worth it. Bye China.
Scandinavian:
This is different from what they can do without biometric passports how ? If the police wants to frame innocent people they can always go hunt for genetic material in your trash.
Can't talk for China, but having a printout of a fingerprint from a database does not seem like evidence to me, in court you need the location of the print as well.
There is a big difference between "You Honor, I have a piece of paper with the suspects prints" versus "You Honor, we found the suspects prints on this vase that was used to keep the flowers in"
