khadaji2002
SOC-12
Yea, it's not a lot of work at all, really. It's an incremental addition to the counting and dispensing machines.
Consider another example.
The post office pretty much tracks every piece of mail. Every piece of mail is scanned, simply as part of the routing process.
It would not surprise me at all if you got a letter with anthrax in it, that the post office could not tell you from which route that letter came from, where it was picked up. I doubt they have it down to the mail box, etc. But they could probably tell you which route.
Is that actionable on its own? No. But it's data that can be used in a post mortem to gain insight for an investigation.
If you have Netflix, you should watch the show they have that was on Discovery about the Unibomber and appreciate the level of effort the FBI went through. And that was pre- a lot of stuff that we have today.
I work for the Post Office.

Someone who stays very mobile of course avoids that kind of tracking. However, a mobile lifestyle also requires a fair bit of resources to maintain, so unless our anthrax mailer has a large amount of non-anthrax-tainted cash laying around they're going to be using cards for many of their transactions. It would take some time, but even today the FBI could track someone like that down in a surprisingly short amount of time.
So, IMO, high law level/high tech level worlds routinely trace essentially all activities of their citizens, and anyone entering the world from the starport is going to have a more or less recognizable tracker on their person to allow their movements to be followed as well. If you don't like it....don't level the starport.