Technology and privacy–a short personal story

February 3, 2017 at 3:58 PMMichele Mottini

I went to the Italian consulate to renew my passport.

The new passport stores photo and fingerprints on an embedded chip. Immigration just swipes the passport and have the information loaded and ready to be compared. Cool and a bit creepy.

EU privacy laws forbid storing fingerprints - they are just transferred to the chip on the passport. Hurrah for EU privacy laws.

According to the consulate clerk people complains about having to re-take the fingerprints if they loose the passport or such – they’d rather have them stored.

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Trump immigration ban

February 3, 2017 at 3:22 PMMichele Mottini

Pretty scary and unsettling for someone in the US on a green card.

Overnight people with valid visas cannot re-enter the country - including people with green cards.
Later rescinded for green cards holders, but only by a decisions of the Homeland Security secretary, that presumably can change his mind at any time.

Selfishly one could think that this applies only to particular 'special' (so to speak) countries.

Beside being selfish - what happens if a European citizen commit a terrorist act in the US? There are for sure some willing French? Belgian? maybe Italians?

Travel ban for Europeans then - including those with visas? Or travel ban for only one European country - followed by tit-for-tat retaliations from Europe ending up in complete travel freeze?

Yes, not very probable - but at this point who knows? Who can exclude such things?

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