JetBlue has started using facial recognition instead of boarding passes

I have to admit my naivety on this, but: What exactly is the problem here?<p>Both the airlines and the involved law enforcement have a right or even a duty to know who you are when you are boarding the plane. They also have facial recognition data, either from a passport photo or putting a camera in front of the check-in, and arguably they have a right to that.<p>People walk around with their faces all the time. They post it on social media. Would it be a problem if a security guard lets you through a gate because he recognizes you? Is it more troublesome that all security guards of the airline now can recognize you at the gate?<p>I think we need to be more precise about what exactly is spooking us and why. Using facial recognition for boarding security is not as big as a problem as facial recognition being used for law enforcement or whatever they do in China now. But that&#x27;s a topic for legislation and regulation. If companies are prohibited from storing personal data without consent, that should be enough to stop almost any legal infringement.<p>If such legislation is impossible, because your government is completely unaccountable, or because companies are unaccountable to such laws, then that is a much bigger problem than the potential for violations of privacy...<p>With regards to privacy I keep coming back to the conclusion that it is more important and effective to improve and enforce regulations than to beat up on particular technologies.

How much longer will we allow our freedoms to be eroded?<p>People were flying without any photo ID until just a few years ago (except internationally). We’ve given up so much freedom &amp; so much of what made air travel fun in exchange for so little.<p>We need to stop letting people scare us into giving away our freedoms.

I am guessing that the bigger concern here is that this is an &#x27;enabler&#x27; tactic to expand facial recognition in other areas of our lives. And if this is the case, then there definitely needs to be some kind of ratification.<p>Maybe this is unrelated, but it&#x27;s starting to feel like every bad accident in this world is affecting us in this very strange way. For example, I was very surprised to find that Sri Lanka cut everyone off from social media &quot;just like that&quot;. To think there are people with this kind of power seems a little frightening to say the least.<p>But, what&#x27;s even scarier is that these bombings and &#x27;tragic&#x27; events tend to steer us in a very controlling direction. <i>All of a sudden</i> the government has an incentive to enforce more control over its citizens and society as a whole.

This sounds pretty insane indeed. How much should we be concerned about that? The gvt already has our image data, and knows our moves anyway right? Even without facial recognition, IDs and passports are asked when you travel, so the documentation of your travels already exists I assume?

Can we not link to &quot;IFLS&quot;? They&#x27;re a horrible Facebook fad follower site with no real reverence for science. (-_-)

A related story that hasn&#x27;t received much traction on HN:<p>&gt;US wants to use facial recognition on air travelers leaving the country<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1598148&#x2F;us-wants-to-use-facial-recognition-on-air-travelers-leaving-the-country&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1598148&#x2F;us-wants-to-use-facial-recognition-on...</a>

I think this is being blown a bit out of proportion. The government definitely has your passport photo in a database. And since this facial recognition is happening only at boarding gates of international flights, it’s totally plausible that CBP has an isolated system, where Jetblue operates the device but doesn’t get any of the data.

In the us, we&#x27;ve successfully avoided a gun registry (with the exception of a few states) probably because gun ownership has such a direct connection with the idea of a potential tyrannical government. But these types of systems are going to be the true backbone of a tyrannical government. The gun community has successfully built a lobby organization to maintain these freedoms (I&#x27;d argue mostly through peer pressure.) Perhaps there&#x27;s a model here that privacy advocates can replicate.

If a private company says they&#x27;ll take a picture of me at checkin and then verify that at boarding vs the same picture - then destroy the picture, I&#x27;m fine with that. It&#x27;s a temporary storage of biometric data. I&#x27;m especially fine with it if I can opt to go for a paper passport instead.<p>BUT<p>If a private company uses some database, especially a centralized&#x2F;government database, to do the same task - then it&#x27;s absolutely dystopian.

Last time I came into SFO through Global Entry there was no passport scan needed, just a quick look in the camera and it printed my receipt to enter the country.<p>I&#x27;ve often thought that border control has the best time lapse of me aging

That biometric data is stored by a government is a whole other discussion in my eyes. If they provide a secure API that just let&#x27;s you query through facial data and return which passenger from the company provided list it is I&#x27;m fine as long as the biometric data gets destroyed afterwards (the one provided to the API). But of course how can I know this as a passenger. I like the idea to make a process less painful but yeah it seems to have a lot of pitfalls

I tried this. It’s junk. So much slower than a boarding pass scan.<p>I’ve seen good setups for this like at the UK border. This is not the same.<p>Almost everyone got rejected and got looked at by staff, especially black people who the machine seemed incapable of recognizing. Children? No chance.<p>I get it, there are privacy concerns which should rank higher, but you don’t even need to pull them out here. This is just useless bad tech.

So how does this work for international travelers? Presumably the US government does not have the entire world&#x27;s passport photos? Or do they...? Pretty worrying if so ... time for some GDPR requests maybe ...<p>I think at Gatwick in the UK they have a similar system where they take a photo of you as you enter security and it is then checked again at the gate. It does not work well if you are wearing glasses.<p>I wonder if some certain styles of eye wear would make facial recognition significantly ineffective? Highly unsymmetrical with lenses opaque to IR etc.

I&#x27;d be as worried about false positives and false negatives as I would be about losing privacy - and I would certainly be worried about that.<p>Of course, the security of actual boarding passes seems extremely flimsy compared to the rest of airport security. The airlines could just take a picture and do no more verification at all, and wind-up with current security.

Why do airlines even need to know your name (much less your gender — remember the press ballyhoo a few months ago when some airlines expanded their list from male and female)?<p>I can see that they might want to know that each passenger has paid for the seat but that’s about it.

So, many fears about surveillance infrastructure to be deployed for use cases like this one are already too late to the party. That&#x27;s already done, the framework over all the apps are being deployed, like looking for faces to tell who&#x27;s who

Presumably the government already has a list of people flying - do they really need your photo to do a scan against a list of warrants for your arrest? And do we not want them scanning that list against folks with a warrant for their arrest?

How does Jet Blue know when you have opted out? By scanning your face, seeing you have opted out, and prompt for the actual boarding pass?

This is how it works. Airline takes multiple photos of you. Sends those photos along with flight context data. Over secure lines. To Homeland. They match photo to passport and passport info to flight manifest. All outside of the airlines infrastructure. Or at least should be.

can someone please explain calmly why the fear-mongering, the hysteria and use of the words terrify are justified about this?

Ha. Seen your average US airport lately? Most look like a scene from the third world. Underfunded, dilapidated facilities coupled with cheapskate US carriers. Good luck with that.

That is great,