A conversation between a passenger and an airline has gone viral, largely because people find it intensely creepy.
MacKenzie Fegan went to the airport last week. As with normal flights, she was expecting at some point to present her boarding card in order to get on her plane. However, she found all she had to do was look at a camera, and at no point was asked for her pass.
As convenient as that sounds, she had questions, which she put to the airline, JetBlue, in a now-viral thread.
I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight. Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge. Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to me? Did I consent to this?
— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019Fegan had several pressing follow-up questions, such as "how" and "who exactly has my face on record?".
"Presumably these facial recognition scanners are matching my image to something in order to verify my identity," she wrote. "How does JetBlue know what I look like?"
So how concerned should we be that companies like JetBlue have access to this data?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @05:53PM
Are you sure that's what happened? I was pretty sure that when the biometric passports were introduced people were promised it wasn't possible for just anyone who wanted to read and hold on to that biometric data.