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Also don't mind the giant pile of cash someone got paid with public funds to address this crisis via government contacts.
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.
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.
Everyone commenting here is right that it really doesn’t save that much time when boarding a plane, but think of where else it could save time.
(I probably shouldn’t go into details even though I never signed an NDA, so I guess I technically could talk about it)
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This doesn't really change anything other than just being more damning evidence against you slightly easier to obtain. 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 startin…
The crucial difference here is that phone and vehicle data is something you can control - Between disabling location history, moving to a non-apple OS, and turning off your connection, there's a range of steps you can take currently to reduce or eliminate your trackable history. Ubiquitous facial identification is not something we can manage, however, and should be considered deeply concerning. Privacy is only dead f…
Sadly, by all measures Android with Google Play Services is worse for privacy than iOS. Presumably, non-Googled Android (e.g. LineageOS w/o Google Play) is better than that, but that's not the majority use case of Android.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, for international flights the airline additionally checks your passport at the gate (at least in the US).
But the system is quite flaky, my arrival/departure record is missing a few departures - and I think that's where CBP want to improve things, possibly so they can more legitimately claim that someone overstayed when their records are incomplete. (And I guess also to spot passport swaps.)
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.
The TSA itself has admitted that there is no evidence of a threat of terrorism against aviation in the US[0].
[0] https://professional-troublemaker.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-...
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> “This spring, Lufthansa announced that it boarded an A380 with over 350 passengers at LAX in less than 20 minutes—less than half of their normal time—using self-boarding gates linked to CBP’s facial-enabled traveler verification service,” McAleenan said. Lufthansa got on the PR train perhaps. Who knows? 20 doesn't sound a lot, but over many flights it starts to add up. I think it is mostly about the international t…
> “This spring, Lufthansa announced that it boarded an A380 with over 350 passengers at LAX in less than 20 minutes—less than half of their normal time—using self-boarding gates linked to CBP’s facial-enabled traveler verification service,” McAleenan said. This smells of a staged PR stunt. Or, maybe "boarded" means people were all through the gate, but not necessarily on the plane?
At best, it means they boarded an A380 through multiple doors in parallel instead of all through a single scanning location. This only matters for planes big enough to have multiple entrances.
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…
> “This spring, Lufthansa announced that it boarded an A380 with over 350 passengers at LAX in less than 20 minutes—less than half of their normal time—using self-boarding gates linked to CBP’s facial-enabled traveler verification service,” McAleenan said. Lufthansa got on the PR train perhaps. Who knows? 20 doesn't sound a lot, but over many flights it starts to add up. I think it is mostly about the international t…