<i>The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing</i><p>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%.<p><i>The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.</i><p>So at least they are clear that this is a cost-saving method for airlines, it has nothing to do with speeding boarding or making boarding more secure.<p><i>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. “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen.</i><p>Oh wait, I guess it is about speeding boarding... but is boarding pass scanning really what slows boarding? I always seem to get backed up in the line at the plane door, waiting for everyone to stow their carryons and sit down. Most busy flights have two agents scanning and most people who have flown more than once scan their pass/phone quickly.... I'm surprised it's any faster getting people to stand in the right spot and stand still for a photo.
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 process anyway. And 99% accuracy is not actually great...
>> “It doesn’t matter,” Maryland resident Kim Meekins said of not being informed ahead of time. “You go to different airports and they do different things depending on their technology. If it’s another safety measure to make sure everyone has a safe flight, I’m all for whatever. I didn’t need to be notified ahead of time.”<p>"I'm all for whatever"! The hell does one engage rationally with <i>that</i>?
I can't remember a time when I boarded a plane that I didn't have to wait in a queue on the jet bridge. How does this help with that? Also, I'm constantly seeing people accidentally end up in the wrong row or seat because they misread the label up above. Invariably, everyone takes out boarding passes to sort it out.<p>Reeks of a trojan horse to get more pervasive face scanners in place.
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.<p>Also don't mind the giant pile of cash someone got paid with public funds to address this crisis via government contacts.
>For Thea Ottersen of Norway, privacy was not a major concern, as the general procedure doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from American airport security.<p>I suppose that's one unfortunate way to look at it.
Once facial recognition becomes commonplace, the impact will be huge.<p>“What were your whereabouts on the night of June 5th?”<p>“I was at home all night.”<p>“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.”<p>That sends a shiver down my spine.
> “The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.”<p>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 digital system.<p>> “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen.”<p>Yikes, this sounds like Idiocracy to me. I frequently am the befuddled dad traveling with kids and bags, and I can tell you that apart from very exceptional circumstances or special needs, this is not at all any kind of serious inconvenience that requires more surveillance culture. (And for truly special needs situations, there are many parsimonious solution possibilities that don’t use a bazooka to swat a fly like this face recognition system is doing...)
So after the 20 to 30 minute procedure of handing your ID and boarding pass to a TSA agent, taking off your shoes, belt, emptying your pockets and having a full body scan done, adding a facial scan at the gate is somehow going to improve both boarding time and security. Right that makes sense. This shit needs to stop.
Note - this is only for <i>international</i> flights, where CBP takes your photo anyway.<p>Data retention period is 14 days for pilot testing, 12 hours for some unspecified "short term", and zero after that.
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?
> Officials touted the additional security the system provides—meeting a Congressional mandate to include biometric screenings—<p>Said someone who clearly doesn’t understand security. The entire point of adding biometrics is that it is <i>in addition to</i> the passport, not instead of. All they’ve done here is trade something you have with something you are. Sigh.
But people have similar faces called eigen faces in Mathematics. This is not Secure because faces are not unique. Similar to finding a similar to you looking face on the street/internet. Humans have an average faces and then diverge from that.<p>Eigenface
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface</a>
<i>The system then compares the photo to a gallery that includes images of that person—either their passport photo for U.S. citizens or the photo taken of foreign nationals when they entered the country.</i><p>So those of us with dual nationality, who enter the US on our US passports and leave on our foreign passports, are going to get screwed. Lovely.
17 years after 9/11, my question is:
we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that?
Or is it a false causality? Can we even establish causality between the enhanced security and the lack of large-scale airplane attacks/hijackings?
The technology is really just being piloted here in a low-risk application.<p>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.<p>(I probably shouldn’t go into details even though I never signed an NDA, so I guess I technically could talk about it)
Is the scanning of boarding passes really the thing that slows down boarding? They rarely pause between groups because of a line of people getting scanned. It's more often that the line of people waiting to get onto the plane has stretched too far down the jetbridge.
I'm really surprised they were able to cut boarding time in half with this, my experience is that the gate isn't the bottleneck, it's little old ladies with 50lb carryons struggling to get them into the overhead bin and blocking the aisle.
On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat.<p>And if identity actually mattered (hint: it doesn't), well it's already been "screened" via the purchase and TSA checkpoint tests.<p>Planes flew for decades without any matching of passengers to tickets, and tickets were frequently resold (especially unused legs) via classified ads and later eBay. The airlines were delighted when the government (without any evidence to justify it) told them to start matching people to tickets.
It seems like this system has been designed with privacy in mind, after the pilot program, they won't store your image after the comparison. The only question is will it remain that way?
According to the Geneva Convention, refugees don't need a visa or travel documents like passports to travel (to make it purposefully more difficult to mess with persecuted people, like Germany did by stamping a "J" in the passport of Jewish citizens so it would be easier for countries who didn't want them to refuse them). I have fears that widespread adoption of systems like this could make air travel for refugees inaccessible if governments really want to.
> For Thea Ottersen of Norway, privacy was not a major concern, as the general procedure doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from American airport security.<p>Conditioning works.
Tangent, but I thought Dulles Airport's "moon buggies" felt super weird to have to go onto after a long international flight. It felt like I was loaded into an armored personnel carrier or something.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge</a>
> The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.<p>Do they really do that? I mean in most airport? And in Dubai (dxb) you just scan the barcode on your boarding pass and board the plane. No one checks your identity.
I don't remember which airport it was, but I remember seeing a facial recognition scanner where the camera first physically moves up/down to match the height of the person (which takes a few seconds), and then takes a photo. Quite a ridiculous system if you ask me.
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.<p>From a legal standpoint, domestic travel is different (and there should be open debate in Congress before they make a decision there). But I fully support facial recognition for international travel and other immigration benefits.
There is no way in hell this is a good thing for US Citizens. First it's good for doing your boarding pass but then it will be used for identifying people on the street, maybe at a protest and then locking them away if they disagree with the political party in power. FML
This is sort of “hurry up and wait”; <i>every</i> time I feel like I got through the gate quickly, I just end up in line on the jet bridge or waiting 2 minutes for someone to fish every variety of item out of their overhead bin while the whole plane waits for them.<p>The cause of slower boarding is BAGGAGE FEES. Airlines are penny-pinching, people bring everything on board to compensate, and struggling with luggage is slow as hell.