The Grave and Growing Dangers of Border Surveillance – Digital Freedom Fund

Such a large-scale reliance on these technologies has reduced human bodies into evidence. As a result, and in an effort to regain some control over their bodies and their data, there have been a number of disturbing reports about refugees burning off their own fingerprints out of fear of being tracked and returned to countries of origin, or to entry-point countries in the EU due to the Dublin Regulation. …there have been a number of disturbing reports about refugees burning off their own fingerprints Like facial recognition technology, fingerprint readers were built on racialised assumptions of users, and only have high accuracy with middle aged men with lighter skin tones. There has been a pattern of centralised collection and storage of this biometric and personal data across sectors and agencies, seen with public-private partnerships like Palantir-WFP, Microsoft-International Committee for the Red Cross, and Facebook Libra-Mercy Corps.