Is your personal information protected when you travel?

Once upon a time, before the coronavirus pandemic era, I had the opportunity to travel in Africa (Egypt and Tanzania) when people still could travel for leisure. During our stay, we went to several hotels, the Nile cruise in Egypt, and Safari to visit National parks in Tanzania.

Whenever we landed on each facility to stay, the hotel managers were asking us the passports until this step, nothing strange. What came after was problematic. In each facility, including the cruise ship and executive camping deep in the National Part, they were coping and keeping our passport copies. The strange part was in Egypt Nile cruise ship hotel manager had to copy all the passenger passports using the small copy machine, something that took several days to finished. When I have asked what you are going to do with the passport copies, they said they sent them to police authorities, as the paper files and also digital copies.

The infrastructure of these facilities made it clear that the passport copies were not securely protected; thus, anybody could access the passport copies; if not, how would that be on the government authority.

Wouldn’t this be a perfect case for identity theft?

Abbas Moallem

Author: admin

Abbas Moallem