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posted by janrinok on Sunday October 13 2019, @03:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can't-change-the-password dept.

Wall Street company Clear offers a fast way around the long TSA lines at a number of large USA airports. Here's an article about it, https://www.fastcompany.com/90245393/clear-new-york-startup-speed-through-lines-at-airport-or-stadium

What's the pitch? You can sign up right at the airport in five minutes for $179 a year. If you are about to miss your flight because the TSA lines are an hour long, this might look like a trip saver. Of course there is a catch, they use biometric data: fingerprints, irises, faces... and a promise that your data is safe with them.

Clear's only domestic competition at airports is the Transportation Security Administration's service TSA PreCheck, which has more members (7 million), and is much cheaper ($85 for five years) and more widely available (200-plus airports). Another program, Global Entry, is run by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service to expedite passage of international travelers entering the United States. PreCheck and Global Entry both collect fingerprints from participating travelers but unlike Clear do not capture iris or facial scans. All three of the services—PreCheck, Global Entry, and Clear—worked with the Department of Homeland Security to develop tools that could predict the threat level of individual travelers, the "known traveler" model.

Clear is currently experimenting with an adaptation of this model that could be deployed at a vast number of non-airport venues. "In travel, prescreening programs like PreCheck and Global Entry create known travelers," Clear said in a statement to Fast Company. "As a qualified anti-terrorism technology, Clear believes creating known fan programs can continue to make experiences safer and easier." A former Clear executive put it this way: "If you wanted to do predictive analytics to show who at a stadium is more likely to bring a gun in, they have the ability to do that."

Here's the company pitch if anyone is interested : https://www.clearme.com/how-it-works/


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:06PM (4 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:06PM (#906591)

    Or you can live somewhere other than the United States of Total Paranoia, where the security lines are 5-10 minutes long even on busy days.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:47PM (#906593)

    That's optimistic. I missed a plane due to a long ass TSA line once.

  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday October 13 2019, @10:30PM

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Sunday October 13 2019, @10:30PM (#906743)

    The last time I flew home from Melbourne an American woman asked the Australian security guy whether she should take off her shoes yet?

    He looked at her like she was drunk and said "Why the hell would you do that"? People laughed.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 14 2019, @04:52AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 14 2019, @04:52AM (#906840)

    "where the security lines are 5-10 minutes long even on busy days." - where would that be?

    I fly all over Europe and there's ALWAYS a stinkin line that takes longer than 10 minutes to go through. Usually because European airports don't like to man the ticket counters/check in until just before a flight.

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 14 2019, @09:50PM

      by driverless (4770) on Monday October 14 2019, @09:50PM (#907133)

      I'm flying in about half an hour so I decided to time things, 8 minutes to get from check-in through to after security. This is early morning so a relatively busy time, in Australia.

      Most amusing check-in experience was in Croatia, where some US tourists were getting ready to strip to their underwear, or so it seemed. One of them asked the Croatian security guy how much they needed to do for the security check, and he replied by asking whether they were carrying firearms. When they said "no" he waved them through.

      Good sensible approach to security.