Do you have a state driver’s license? If so, then chances are data brokers have your photo from that.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2021/03/19/its-mind...

And your fingerprints …

I am not from the US so no. And when I did visit the US, I was young enough not to have to give my fingerprints at the airports.

If it was a while back, your passport probably wasn’t the kind with a chip. If you visit today, your passport photo is electronically readable. I have no idea if the feds are as sloppy with this data as the states are though.

Seems like the end game for that technological development is kind of self-defeating.

Once it's 2 clicks away to generate a believable video of someone at the kkk kitten barbecue getting along with ted bundy and jeff epstein, surely the evidence value of that would dwindle, and the brief period in history when video evidence was both accessible and somewhat believable will come to an end.

Lynchings aren't commonly waged based on a solid process of evaluating evidence.

In that regard, the presence of this type of evidence isn't worth much either, a malicious rumor or an accusation is plenty sufficient to stoke the flames of an angry and terrified mob, nobody's going to pause the proceedings and wait for a fair and cool-headed judgement of evidence. This is after all a phenomenon that is far older than the smartphone.

It turns out that humans aren't perfectly rational actors. Actors get hatemail and death threats because of roles they've played, "evidence" that isn't just potentially suspect but actually known to be entirely fictional.

You're right -- there's nothing axiomatic about the trustworthiness of pixels, and there was a brief window of Time in human history when photos/videos had the qualities you mentioned, and (sadly) that era will end soon.

Being savvy means not treating photos/videos as "untrustworthy", which (ironically) is one of the things the Western world made fun of the Taliban for -- their fundamentalist view called it "haram":

https://www.deseret.com/1997/10/6/19338048/taliban-army-bans...

I worry about written matter too, and here as well, vast masses of LLM-spewed text will surely pollute the landscape irreversibly.