on youtube I watched a British reality show about airports and (mostly foreign) passengers being searched for anything illegal.

What I find troubling is that many of these passengers speak very little English and find it difficult to articulate an answer to what officers ask in English. I remember an Indian national who didn’t speak any English that though he had the right visa to work in the UK, only to find he had been duped by an Indian scammer and was refused entry. He started crying and the crew filmed the whole scene.

This is humiliating to say the least and I wouldn’t want this to happen to me if I visit the UK. My questions:

  • Should a reality crew start recording me, do I have a right to my image and can I tell them to stop recording me? Do tv crews respect that?

  • What about the police? Can they record my face, even if I don’t consent?

  • I also have a cultural question: If an officer at a British airport asks you if he can search your luggage and you say no and you ask him if you are under arrest, what happens then?

  • MrScottyTayEnglish
    91·
    11 months ago

    We have CCTV everywhere so no matter what we’re almost always getting recorded anyway. For a show though they should have had to sign a waiver otherwise they’d have to be blurred. Whether or not that was done legitimately for those that barely speak English? No idea.

    Also I think if customs have any suspicions they have the right to search your bag. I don’t think it’s a case of whether you want them to or not. When you go through customs and you put your bags in the conveyor belt they’re looking into your bags with xrays, and if the xray is inconclusive, they search your bag. They don’t tell you about it. You’re on the other side still waiting for your bags. It’s only afterwards that they’ll be like “hey, I just had to check your bag, was a false flag, it was just your beard scissors”. Which happened to me just the other week actually.

    If this is the show I think it is, I think it was very short lived and only lasted a season, maybe two. Australia had one that lasted longer though I believe but that focused more on packages going into the country and not just passengers. Mostly dealing with their eco-bio laws or whatever they’re called.