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Once facial recognition becomes commonplace, the impact will be huge. “What were your whereabouts on the night of June 5th?” “I was at home all night.” “You’re lying. We have confirmation your face was recognized at the gas station, grocery store and bank between the hours of 7 and 9pm.” That sends a shiver down my spine.
I suppose that's one unfortunate way to look at it.
The speed of boarding pass checks is rarely the limiting factor for loading a plane. Perhaps the A380 is different? Are they comparing a single human boarding pass checker vs multiple facial scanner lanes?
I can see the number of scanning lanes (which is usually 1) being a bottleneck on large aircrafts with lots of doors, like the A380 example they have given.
This suggests that downstream of the boarding pass scan is already the true bottleneck of the system.
As long as false flags get sent to a human gate agent standing right there who can make manual approvals, I fail to see why anyone traveling internationally would object to this. I sure as heck want everyone else on the plane with me to be compared against their photograph. From a legal standpoint, domestic travel is different (and there should be open debate in Congress before they make a decision there). But I full…
I sure as heck want everyone else on the plane with me to be compared against their photograph. Why? I'm sure there's nefarious activity that could be prevented, I'm just struggling to identify activities that would make be feel (let alone actually be) unsafe on an airplane as a practical matter, and without doning a screen writer's hat. I'm assuming weapons are already adequately checked. And if not I'm not sure how…
You assume fear of being bombed or hijacked, but it's really to make international travel easier and more efficient.
Lack of a reliable way to verify identity is a major reason why applicants for admission (or applicants for a visa) are assumed "guilty until proven innocent", and a ton of people are denied visas (or denied entry) every day on the slightest reasons as a result.
Being able to verify someone identity biometrically makes international travel and immigration more trustworthy, which makes it politically more palatable to make the lives of travelers and immigrants easier.
And doing this on outbound flights is no different from doing it on inbound flights - from the host government's perspective, they need to know when people enter and leave.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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% Is this worse than the current security measures in place while boarding?
Probably not since agents don't check ID at all, but if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent, I'd like to think that I'm getting something out of the deal.
The same place where you literally already have to have your passport scanned, your face photographed, you're recorded in every area that isn't a restroom, where if you're not a US national your fingerprints taken, and they literally scan you beneath your clothes? You're worried about your privacy _there_?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably not since agents don't check ID at all, but if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent, I'd like to think that I'm getting something out of the deal.
> if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent The same place where you literally already have to have your passport scanned, your face photographed, you're recorded in every area that isn't a restroom, where if you're not a US national your fingerprints taken, and they literally scan you beneath your clothes? You're worried about your privacy _th…
I'm fine with the TSA scanning my passport, and the airport filming me. What I'm not so fine with is the airport also having my photo and identity, so now they aren't just filming me every place I walk in the airport, but they are also correlating that to my identity.
Once facial recognition becomes commonplace, the impact will be huge. “What were your whereabouts on the night of June 5th?” “I was at home all night.” “You’re lying. We have confirmation your face was recognized at the gas station, grocery store and bank between the hours of 7 and 9pm.” That sends a shiver down my spine.
If you carry a phone of any kind, it is already betraying your movements. All it takes to paint you like a game of Snake is a subpoena to Google (for GPS history) or your carrier (tower associations), assuming they don't pull your location history out of the device itself.
Hell, even cars are starting to get in on it with self-reporting telemetry even if you manage to avoid all the commodity ALPR scans.
Your privacy is already dead. You're objecting to death itself at this point.
> “The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.” But you can hold accountable an airline or customs gate agent who doesn’t have access to a library of images forming a signature of your face and who may be bound by policies or laws regarding privacy and identity that could be nearly impossible to enforce or even verify with a digita…
> Yikes, this sounds like Idiocracy to me.
Yeah, or one of those ludicrous infomercials. ‘Are you tired of dealing with hoses? Try new Stretch-Hose™ the only hose made from rubber bands!’
More seriously, I guess since we’ve already given up our privacy when travelling internationally (since the Great War, anyway, when passports were generally instituted), this is probably not that much of a change. And I guess it’s marginally more convenient. Just … seems like a solution in search of a problem, really.
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.