biometric data collection
My fiancee, soccer_fox, and I are getting married in Edinburgh in January, so (being both US cits), we had to get visas for marriage.
I will spare you my rants on countries who don't provide consulates where their embassies are, who don't provide in-person visa services, and who privatise their visa services so if you want answers to questions then you have to call a fee per minute telephone number (yes, I know that *both* the US and the UK do this--I think it's irresponsible of both of them).
ANYway, I will, as I said, spare you that rant and proceed directly to describing our biometric adventure. See, having filled out all the visa forms, and assembled the mountain of supporting data to prove that we were not secretly planning to scam the British government by pretending to get married and then secretly and illegally staying in the UK and living off the dole... *cough* sorry, having assembled all the papers we needed to submit with the application, we had to also arrange to provide biometric data, as the UK now requires this on their visas.
Now, we were expecting this to consist of "plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and ... twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us." Or at least fingerprints, thumprints, eyeprints, skull prints, face scans, nose scans... We figured it would take forever, be very arcane, cost a lot of money, and in general be a PITA. Instead, here was what happened.
As each of us completed the online application, the automated form explained about the biometric requirement and asked which of several locations (based on the information we had entered about where we live) we wanted to go submit for biometric scanning. We picked one that was about seven miles away from us, a US Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) center. It then gave us a calendar and asked us each to choose a day for our appointment and then gave each of us a choice of times during that day that we could go. She chose 10 am on Saturday (yesterday--we did this midweek), and then I chose 11 am (since it appeared to only offer one appointment per hour). Along with our online visa application papers, the website printed us out an appointment page confirming where and when we had signed up for the biometrics and what ID to bring (passport, visa application, and the appointment sheet itself).
We showed up on the appointed day (a little late--due to traffic--for the first appointment) at what turned out to be a double-wide strip mall shop space that has been done up as a USCIS office. We checked in with a private security guard who was very pleasant and chatty and who checked our documents and gave us numbers off one of those perforated pull-strips of numbers. Then we went and sat in chairs, of which there were a large number, the majority of them were empty, the remainder being populated by people who were, we strongly suspected, getting USCIS domestic services (US visas, green cards, citizenship papers). After a few minutes, her number came up and she walked up to a desk where someone checked that she had the right ID and appointment paper and then told her to sit down again. A few minutes after *that* she got called up and a technician cleaned her hands with some sort of corn-based oil and alcohol (?) wipes and took her finger and thumb prints using a scanner. While that was going on, I got called up and they did the same steps with me. They took photos of each of us to go with the fingerprints, but they did no retina scan. Our appointment papers were stamped and initialed and we got those back (we had to send them in with the visa applications). And that was it. It took about twenty minutes from when we walked in the door to when we were both done and free to go.
I assume that the data is all stored electronically and can be retrieved by the UK visa office whenever they want. Certainly the information that I had entered on the visa application was there on file in the USCIS computer when they pulled up the record from the barcode on the appointment sheet and asked me to verify it.
For interaction with a government agency on a fairly important matter of record, it seemed remarkably (suspiciously) quick and easy. And having been ink-fingerprinted many times before (for security clearances, not for criminal activity :-), I can attest that doing it with scanners was a LOT less messy.
Hope this is useful for anyone who is needing to do this and is curious or apprehensive about the process.
I will spare you my rants on countries who don't provide consulates where their embassies are, who don't provide in-person visa services, and who privatise their visa services so if you want answers to questions then you have to call a fee per minute telephone number (yes, I know that *both* the US and the UK do this--I think it's irresponsible of both of them).
ANYway, I will, as I said, spare you that rant and proceed directly to describing our biometric adventure. See, having filled out all the visa forms, and assembled the mountain of supporting data to prove that we were not secretly planning to scam the British government by pretending to get married and then secretly and illegally staying in the UK and living off the dole... *cough* sorry, having assembled all the papers we needed to submit with the application, we had to also arrange to provide biometric data, as the UK now requires this on their visas.
Now, we were expecting this to consist of "plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and ... twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us." Or at least fingerprints, thumprints, eyeprints, skull prints, face scans, nose scans... We figured it would take forever, be very arcane, cost a lot of money, and in general be a PITA. Instead, here was what happened.
As each of us completed the online application, the automated form explained about the biometric requirement and asked which of several locations (based on the information we had entered about where we live) we wanted to go submit for biometric scanning. We picked one that was about seven miles away from us, a US Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) center. It then gave us a calendar and asked us each to choose a day for our appointment and then gave each of us a choice of times during that day that we could go. She chose 10 am on Saturday (yesterday--we did this midweek), and then I chose 11 am (since it appeared to only offer one appointment per hour). Along with our online visa application papers, the website printed us out an appointment page confirming where and when we had signed up for the biometrics and what ID to bring (passport, visa application, and the appointment sheet itself).
We showed up on the appointed day (a little late--due to traffic--for the first appointment) at what turned out to be a double-wide strip mall shop space that has been done up as a USCIS office. We checked in with a private security guard who was very pleasant and chatty and who checked our documents and gave us numbers off one of those perforated pull-strips of numbers. Then we went and sat in chairs, of which there were a large number, the majority of them were empty, the remainder being populated by people who were, we strongly suspected, getting USCIS domestic services (US visas, green cards, citizenship papers). After a few minutes, her number came up and she walked up to a desk where someone checked that she had the right ID and appointment paper and then told her to sit down again. A few minutes after *that* she got called up and a technician cleaned her hands with some sort of corn-based oil and alcohol (?) wipes and took her finger and thumb prints using a scanner. While that was going on, I got called up and they did the same steps with me. They took photos of each of us to go with the fingerprints, but they did no retina scan. Our appointment papers were stamped and initialed and we got those back (we had to send them in with the visa applications). And that was it. It took about twenty minutes from when we walked in the door to when we were both done and free to go.
I assume that the data is all stored electronically and can be retrieved by the UK visa office whenever they want. Certainly the information that I had entered on the visa application was there on file in the USCIS computer when they pulled up the record from the barcode on the appointment sheet and asked me to verify it.
For interaction with a government agency on a fairly important matter of record, it seemed remarkably (suspiciously) quick and easy. And having been ink-fingerprinted many times before (for security clearances, not for criminal activity :-), I can attest that doing it with scanners was a LOT less messy.
Hope this is useful for anyone who is needing to do this and is curious or apprehensive about the process.