I'm turned in by Japanese--oh
Starting today, Japan will be photographing and fingerprinting all foreigners that enter the country. Their ostensible reason is that they are afraid of terrorism and want to compare the photographs and fingerprints to international databases.
Unfortunately they refuse to specify how long they will keep the information, meaning they will store it indefinitely.
It's going to be very difficult for anyone in the world to have privacy if countries keep doing these kind of things. If every country does this, than any well-traveled individual has too many copies of their fingerprints floating around.
Why is this a problem? Because fingerprints are often used for identification in biometric systems. Easy access to someone's fingerprints is a great way to steal someone's identity. If Japan only checked the prints and erased them after the visitor left the country, it would be less of an issue.
Of course it's hypocritical for an American to complain about this seeing as how all non-Canadian and Mexican visitors have been experiencing the same treatment for the last few years.
This is why the US needs to be careful with which way it decides to go on controversial security/privacy issues. Even if the measure seems to be reasonable from an US safety perspective, it invites other countries to do the same thing to Americans traveling abroad.
And the same argument applies to torture.
Posted on November 19, 2007
