Book Him Danno..fingerprints!

[eastern wiseguy]

Just a quick query....a pal of mine and I are travelling to the US in a week and we wondered , how long do the US authorities retain the fingerprint impressions they take on entry? Also is our personal information retained PERMANENTLY or deleted at some stage?

EW ...who prolly should get out more!

[FormerFlyer]

Don't know how long they keep them for, but I do know that going into MIA & JFK last Dec (2 trips) then MCO this June & SFB this Nov they had a track of all the trips with all my finger prints to ensure that both my fingers, passport record & person in front of the immigration bloke all tallied - I asked when I was most recently in and he happily explained.

cheers ;)
FF

[sinala1]

Humph

I have gone into the USA umpteen times, but today the 'gentleman' ( :yuk: ) on the arrivals immigration counter at JFK decided that because my fingerprints had a bit of sweat on them they did not match all the other times I have been through, and pulled me aside for secondary screening - delaying the whole crew by 15 minutes - only to have the guy in secondary screening say "you're fine, have a good day"

Job justification maybe? Either way after a busy flight, I was *not* impressed :*

[str12]

Could be for years and years and years, along with all the rest of your personal data...

[20driver]

My wife was fingerprinted coming into MIA last year and was pretty steamed. (Canadains are not supposed to be fingerprinted.)
She did ask an immigration inspector in Toronto a little while back and he said the finger prints were not kept on file but run at the time against data bases and compared to the passport info. He also did confirm that Canadians are not supposed to be fingerprinted. He said the fingerprints were not stored.
Not too sure I believe this. Canadian passports have no fingerprint info and computer comparisions of fingerprints is shaky. My wife thought the guy in MIA was new and seemed kind of lost.

[Globaliser]

One of the (few) bits of entertainment that there is while standing in the immigration queues watching this pantomime is identifying the frequent flyers to the US. They're the ones who hand over their passports and the immediately start wiping their index fingers on their foreheads and faces to try to pick up enough natural oils to get a good print. It's not the only way, but it is effective - and it's funny to see how many people are so used to it that they just do this semi-automatically now.

[bradfordboy]

We are frequent travellers to Florida. We have over a period of time since 9/11 had various grief from immigration.
The last time we could be bothered to go we my wife had an accident a few days before travel when she removed a couple of finger tips. We decided to continue with our holiday although I had a good idea of the problems we might face.
Sure enough when we arrived at Sanford they took her picture no problem. They then took her left index finger print no problem. They then tried to take her right index print and big problem. No right index finger to take a print of. Much discussion later they decided to take her thumb print. Another big problem because it didn't match the print on file for her index print. The only people surprised at this were the immigration people. We were eventually hauled off to their little side room where I tried to explain that if two things matched ie. photo and left index print it was highly likely to be my wife and not Mrs Osama.
After putting this matter up to someone more senior they decided to let us in. After all we hadn't done anything nasty to them in our previous 60 visits so they thought they would risk it.
They would not however put a note on the file to prevent this problem in the future. We haven't bothered to go back since.

Bradfordboy