Re: cannot escape your face
Spot on, it's in your swanky biometric passport, in a format shared by most countries that you're ever likely to travel to. It's how you are able to go through passport control using the e-gates and without a border guard scrutinising your passport and photo. I can only imagine this person travelled between countries using their passport, and also fed it into the machine that "scanned" her face.
I'm surprised that a) this isn't obvious and b) those so concerned by "privacy" aren't already binning passports and drivers licences.
Whether the system actually stores images (possibly - for visitors coming into the US, they certainly take a picture of you and your fingerprints at the border) or not, I can't guess, but it would be far simpler to merely assume that your passport left the country, your image matched the one on the passport, therefore you left the country.
Either way, I know that on subsequent trips to the states, I only need provide a thumbprint now, presumably to verify against my existing scans.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
