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JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

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Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#181

Post by kilroy123 »

jacklewis wrote: post #43

Here in Australia we have automated passport control gates that scan a chip in our passport then takes a photo of our face (and I assume does some matching with our passport photo) before allowing reentry. It's quite quick and very convenient. Although I'm not aware of any airlines being able to use the system for boarding.

I recently flew into Australia (typing this from there). I was so irritated when the scanner wouldn't read my passport for some reason, and I had to stand in the hour-long line at 6 am because of it.

Not sure if my passport chip is broken or the system isn't full proof?

Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#182

Post by AsyncAwait »

arcticbull wrote: post #161
caseysoftware wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, point withdrawn. Overstaying a visa is not a criminal offense. That's a new one for me. Thanks. I think your "who is hurt" approach is weak though. If a country can't enforce its own laws - or worse selectively enforces them - no one is obviously "hurt" but it erodes trust in the systems and process itself. It leaves everything up to the judgement of the people on the ground and damages the concept of equality un…

Yeah, I agree with you about law enforcement, particularly selective law enforcement. It is indeed a dangerous game to play, and while definitely a left-leaning individual I just can't get behind the whole "abolish ICE" thing. I do think that immigration laws in the US are absurdly strict and I have a hard time buying the "America's Full" argument. That said, while laws exist on the books they should be enforced. I w…

> I just can't get behind the whole "abolish ICE" thing.

Not saying one way or another, but the argument is that ICE was only formed 16 years ago and that the U.S. was not 'overrun' before then. The Border Patrol etc. would still remain, just the Stasi-like tactics of removing people from their homes in the middle of the night and holding people in cages would disappear.

At least that's how I've heard the argument.

Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#183

Post by [deleted] »

sksksk wrote: post #177
jacobolus wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who earns income working in the USA has to pay US income and payroll taxes.

you pay income tax in the country you live, not where you work (i.e. if you were employed by a US company, but working remotely in the UK, you'd pay income tax in the UK)

[deleted]

Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#184

Post by ddalex »

yalogin wrote: post #60

I can bet that they have a copy of all photos on their servers. No company will be foolish enough to build a business/service that relies on another entity, much so a government organization that is not known for building highly scalable services. This is a crucial part of their process and any delays will impact their bottom line. So they have all faces with them and so does every other company. Also, just the face…

Probably it's all stored in plain text on an unsecured S3 bucket.

Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#186

Post by perlgeek »

apcragg wrote: post #21

Privacy concerns aside, I can't wait to read the "Facial Recognition let me on the wrong flight when I got in the wrong line by accident" articles that are going to come out of this. Unless these systems have some fantastic (1e-6) P_{false alarm} rate or better, people are going to be mistaken for other people and let on the wrong flight sooner or later.

Accoding to https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/ there are more than 2.6 million passengers a day. So even with 1e-6 you get a handful of falls alarms each day.

When dealing with large systems, even small probabilities regularly occur.

Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#187

Post by oblio »

biztos wrote: post #175
URSpider94 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its worth pointing out that the US is literally the only country in the world that I have visited, in my recollection, that does not have passport control upon exiting the country.

I know it's not quite the same thing, but most countries in the EU have no passport control upon exiting or entering the country as long as it's within the Schengen zone. So France has basically no idea who shows up from Germany or leaves via Belgium. The countries on the external borders are supposed to handle all that. Now I suppose it's possible there is a lot of data exchanged in real time and so on, but it's als…

It's far from the same thing. For all intents and purposes the Schengen Area works like a big country, regarding border control. That's like being surprised that Iowa doesn't check your passport when you head over into the neighboring US state :)

Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#188

Post by taejo »

sksksk wrote: post #177
jacobolus wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who earns income working in the USA has to pay US income and payroll taxes.

you pay income tax in the country you live, not where you work (i.e. if you were employed by a US company, but working remotely in the UK, you'd pay income tax in the UK)

Any country can try to extract any tax from anyone it likes, and in general the US does.

Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#189

Post by shoo »

tootie wrote: post #48

Can biometric data be hashed like a password would be? Or is the signal too noisy?

if you regard hashing as dimensionality reduction, there's certainly hashing involved -- some machine learning pipeline will consume high dimensional raw image data and map it into a lower dimensional feature space

on the other hand, for cryptographic hashing we want very similar but inequal inputs to be hashed to wildly different outputs, so a useful hash function should be highly nonlinear / discontinuous, small changes in the input leading to huge changes in the output.

if we're hashing in machine learning, we probably want the hash function to be (crudely) continuous functions -- with "similar" inputs hashed to similar values, so we can operate on the hashed values to cluster or classify things. we dont want a bit of "noise" in the input to produce a massive difference in the lower dimensional feature space.

Re: JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face

#190

Post by shoo »

Rapzid wrote: post #68
tootie wrote: post #48

Can biometric data be hashed like a password would be? Or is the signal too noisy?

I would guess they encrypt whatever they send to DHS. Hashing would destroy all the information required to make a match.

not necessarily, consider e.g. https://medium.com/value-stream-design/introducing-one-of-th...
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