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Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

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Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#121

Post by nuthje »

jacquesm wrote: post #93
CaptainZapp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most flights within the Schengen area your boarding pass is no more manually checked. That's unless you fly business or are a high value status customer. Instead you just scan your boarding pass / smart phone yourself. I can't imagine that this is in any way slower than a face scan.

I fly from Schiphol with great regularity and my boarding pass is definitely checked every time by a person (as is my passport) right before boarding the plane. Usually the same happens on the return leg, and the majority of my trips are within Schengen.

From Schiphol on Schengen flights frequently (~50% of the time) no one checks anything in my experience outside of scanning the QR to get into security, and into the plance.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#122

Post by [deleted] »

paxy wrote: post #15
Johnny555 wrote: post #9

The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos -- if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1%. The process el…

Identity checks are handled by TSA, not airline employees, so this scan has nothing to do with security. They check your boarding pass to make sure you have paid for the flight you are getting on. Also "99% accuracy" can mean it has a 1% false-negative rate rather than false-positive, in which case they will just defer to scanning the boarding pass like normal.

[deleted]

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#123

Post by NeedMoreTea »

Groxx wrote: post #79
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-scanning in supermarkets was supposedly all about speeding checkout as a benefit to the consumer. This is about speeding boarding - that's the marketing friendly benefit to be shouted about. In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases. The real b…

Per item? Sure. For small numbers of items, counting time spent waiting? Heck no, I regularly get through self-checkout much faster than people who get into a regular queue, in no small part because there's often a few times more self-checkout scanners than there are open checkouts. When you have a full cart or two, the speedier scanning at a traditional checkout pays off. But usually both are available, not just sel…

Not round here.

The big Tesco nearby has a single combined queue for all the 20 or so self-scan checkouts. They are rarely all in service. With a few items it is now always faster to go to an operator checkout unless you go in at 4am. The express lanes of "under 10 items" or "cash only" are a memory of a former, much faster time.

There is often an employee aggressively marshalling people to the self-scan checkouts at every available opportunity and trying to pull them away from the staffed lines.

In the local Pound shop they tried replacing all checkouts with self-scan, getting rid of all others. They had to reverse this a month or two later and put back half a dozen, now brand new, staff operated tills - ripping out a few weeks-old self-scanners to make space. They are again slower thanks to rarely having staff nearby to handle the steady stream of staff authorisations and errors, so there's a big delay every time someone wanders over from the back of the store to wave their bar code and immediately disappear again.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#124

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

cm2187 wrote: post #84
CaptainZapp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most flights within the Schengen area your boarding pass is no more manually checked. That's unless you fly business or are a high value status customer. Instead you just scan your boarding pass / smart phone yourself. I can't imagine that this is in any way slower than a face scan.

I thought airlines or airports were required to check your identity to endure that the checked in luggages fly along the passenger who checked them in, in case there is a bomb or something. Granted this rule is a bit absurd in a world where most terrorist attacks are suicide attacks.

I believe this rule changed years ago when airports introduced 100% luggage screening.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#125

Post by base698 »

Groxx wrote: post #79
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-scanning in supermarkets was supposedly all about speeding checkout as a benefit to the consumer. This is about speeding boarding - that's the marketing friendly benefit to be shouted about. In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases. The real b…

Per item? Sure. For small numbers of items, counting time spent waiting? Heck no, I regularly get through self-checkout much faster than people who get into a regular queue, in no small part because there's often a few times more self-checkout scanners than there are open checkouts. When you have a full cart or two, the speedier scanning at a traditional checkout pays off. But usually both are available, not just sel…

Even a small number of produce items takes a long time because of the time to look up the number or find the sticker to enter and then weigh.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#126

Post by goodcanadian »

wila wrote: post #114
goodcanadian wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The airline checks passports on the way out as they are required to bring you back if you are denied entry at the destination. They try hard not to pay that cost, so they want to make sure you have a passport, all required visas, haven't been barred from the destination, and so on.

Normally they do not really pay tor that cost either as your return ticket is void after being denied entry. But it is indeed inconvenient for them.

Fair point, but it does presuppose you have a return ticket, which isn't always the case.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#127

Post by mikeash »

optimiz3 wrote: post #53
exabrial wrote: post #51

This is a great time to remind everyone to buckle their seatbelts tomorrow. You have a much greater chance of dying in a car wreck tomorrow than you will in your cumulative lifetime risk of dying in an aviation terrorist incident. Also don't mind the giant pile of cash someone got paid with public funds to address this crisis via government contacts.

Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed.

It was true before the new measures as well. Even 9/11 only matched the death toll from one month on American roads.

Basic security measures definitely help. The rate of hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s was absurdly high, and dropped fast one basic screening was put in place. But there’s little evidence that anything beyond that helps.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#128

Post by NeedMoreTea »

rlpb wrote: post #110
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-scanning in supermarkets was supposedly all about speeding checkout as a benefit to the consumer. This is about speeding boarding - that's the marketing friendly benefit to be shouted about. In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases. The real b…

> The real benefit... It is possible for there to be multiple benefits. In fact this is the most desirable, since when there is an immediate economic benefit to both sides, it is incentivized to happen. In the case of supermarket self-scanning, sure, the supermarket can reduce costs. However, the benefit to the customer is in a shorter total time through checkout. Entropy causes customers to arrive at checkouts in sp…

Aldi and Lidl - the discount supermarkets in the UK manage just fine with spurts without a self scan machine anywhere. They are constantly opening and closing checkouts as the people waiting varies. They seem to have a default to get staff off tills and back to the rest of the store when people waiting drops to some prescribed number.

Go in really early or late and there are no lines occupied until a customer waits - usually no more than a minute as they appear to have a strong focus on keeping an eye out.

I would say there's a shorter overall wait, and a far higher likelihood of getting out of the store in the shortest overall time than any of the alternatives at the competition.

So no, I haven't seen any of these much-touted speed benefits. Quite the opposite frequently.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#129

Post by ceejayoz »

duxup wrote: post #39
skywhopper wrote: post #37

I’m skeptical of the faster boarding claim. My perception is that it’s the physical loading of the plane cabin, rather than the scanning of boarding passes, that wastes time. Also, having dealt with the face scanners at the border entry points I’m also skeptical that self service face scanning will be faster than just scanning a boarding pass. Not to mention that security, not boarding, is the painful part of the pro…

Yeah the scanners for tickets are basically ... put ticket on scanner, beep ... now wait in a new line while people load up stuff.

It depends a bit.

On smaller flights, there may only be one gate agent and scanner. If someone's boarding pass isn't correct or there's some other issue, there gets to be a big backlog while they get sorted out. Sometimes that takes several minutes, and the smaller flights are often the ones with short 20-30 minute turnarounds scheduled.

Had this happen on a flight I took a few weeks back.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#130

Post by blitmap »

gok wrote: post #50
jedberg wrote: post #36

> Officials touted the additional security the system provides—meeting a Congressional mandate to include biometric screenings— Said someone who clearly doesn’t understand security. The entire point of adding biometrics is that it is in addition to the passport, not instead of. All they’ve done here is trade something you have with something you are. Sigh.

To say that a boarding pass is “something you have” in a security sense is absurd. I can print your boarding pass merely by knowing your name and where you’re going. A biometric check (backed by a paper ID check) is a dramatic security upgrade over that.

Passports are printed similar to currency. There are many features in them that are hard to replicate. It can be done but not easily, so it does fit the bill of "something you have" to authenticate. Not nearly as secure as a yubikey or an rsa token, but oh well.
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