This Conversation Between A Passenger And An Airline Should Absolutely Terrify You:
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.
Fegan 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?
"You should be concerned," the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote on Twitter. "It's unprecedented for the government to collect and share this kind of data, with this level of detail, with this many agencies and private partners. We need proper oversight and regulation to ensure our privacy is protected."
[...] "Once you take that high-quality photograph, why not run it against the FBI database? Why not run it against state databases of people with outstanding warrants?" Professor Alvaro Bedoya, founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, told The Verge.
"Suddenly you're moving from this world in which you're just verifying identity to another world where the act of flying is cause for a law enforcement search."
Related:
Proposal To Require Facial Recognition For US Citizens At Airports Dropped
Homeland Security Wants Airport Face Scans for US Citizens
Related Stories
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337
Homeland Security wants airport face scans for US citizens
Homeland Security is joining the ranks of government agencies pushing for wider use of facial recognition for US travelers. The department has proposed that US citizens, not just visa holders and visitors, should go through a mandatory facial recognition check when they enter or leave the country. This would ostensibly help officials catch terrorists using stolen travel documents to move about. The existing rules specifically exempt citizens and permanent residents from face scans.
It won't surprise you to hear that civil rights advocates object to the potential expansion. ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley said in a statement that the government was "reneging" on a longstanding promise to spare citizens from this "intrusive surveillance technology." He also contended that this was an unfair burden on people using their "constitutional right to travel," and pointed to abuses of power, data breaches and potential bias as strong reasons to avoid expanding use of the technology.
Via: TechCrunch
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
US Customs and Border Protection said Thursday it will drop its plans to require that US citizens go through a biometric face scan when entering or exiting the country. Currently, citizens have the right to opt out of the scans, but a proposed rule indicated the agency was planning to make the program mandatory for all travelers.
The proposed rule was first published in spring 2018 in the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, a compendium the Executive Office of the President publishes every three months. A rule-making process that allows for public comment typically follows before a proposal can become a new regulation. The CBP's proposal was republished this fall, leading TechCrunch to ask the agency if it was still pursuing the rule.
"There are no current plans to require US citizens to provide photographs upon entry and exit from the United States," the agency said in a statement. "CBP intends to have the planned regulatory action regarding US citizens removed from the unified agenda next time it is published."
Related: Homeland Security Wants Airport Face Scans for US Citizens
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Friday January 03 2020, @11:22PM (6 children)
I wish that privacy was a thing... but I'm always told to never expect privacy in public.
I wish that people cared about my privacy... and they do until they arrive at work Monday morning.
I wish that my data wasn't sold... but I'm told the internet wouldn't function without this model.
I wish that my picture was my own... and it was until I shared it online with a friend through Facebook.
I wish that the entire world was a little more personable... but I'm told that isn't very efficient.
Plus... Who has time.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @11:37PM
As long as they can't identify cock pics, I think you'll be safe.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday January 04 2020, @01:14AM
Companies do care about your privacy. Here at VeryBigCorp we take privacy very seriously. We apologise for our third data breach this year, and promise to try harder next year. In the meantime, here's some free credit monitoring.
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Saturday January 04 2020, @01:41AM
I wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat and a six four Impala... [youtube.com]
compiling...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @01:53AM
Don’t we all.
It’s unfortunate that we don’t really have any choice in the matter, if we want to be a part of the modern world.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 04 2020, @09:57AM
Well, that was always true. Or do you really think anything you did in a medieval village outside your home ever stayed private?
With few exceptions, people other than you never cared about your privacy. Gossip is as old as humanity.
The other three points however are new, as far as I can tell.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @12:24PM
FTFY. You don't have to submit the pictures yourself. Part of a group picture? Anyone submitting and annotating it puts you in the system.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @01:08AM (9 children)
Already at a point where I regulate my speech in my own house because I have to regard it as a public place due to all the surveillanceware from consumer electronics.
Won't be long before a camera found in a public shithouse is a commercial service. After all, it is profiling your butthole so that paper dispenser can look up your preferred waddage, and charge you a different rate per square based on your past buying preferences.
Better still will be the facial recognition used by Christian fundamentalists to profile and assault women who use abortion clinics. Oh yeah, IOT is a just a brave new world alright.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @01:28AM (2 children)
I fear more leftists trying to ruin the life of sexists (aka non-feminists) or what they called bigots than whatever Christian fundamentalists can do. I know because it happens all the time, most recently they tried to get a guy expelled from an university in my country
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @02:18PM
catch you later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 05 2020, @04:15AM
which relates to privacy... how?
your thought is disordered. Go read some cultural theory. Know thine enemy. Until you do, you're the hick farmer shaking his hoe (yes, his) at the jets overhead dumping agent orange. You're not even on the same field.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @04:50PM
Reminds me of this parody:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Saturday January 04 2020, @06:32PM (4 children)
>Better still will be the facial recognition used by Christian fundamentalists to profile and assault women who use abortion clinics. Oh yeah, IOT is a just a brave new world alright.
Wait what?
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday January 05 2020, @03:22PM
Not sure what you don't understand or are confused about.
Christian fundamentalist do profile and assault women [wikipedia.org] who use abortion clinics. The modern day IoT profiling would be just another tool that is used by anyone who wants to assault. I took GP's comment about abortion clinics to be one of a millions examples of how it can abused.
I used to know a woman who stayed off social media because of a violent ex. I'm not sure who she copes with it today with information being so available to private investigators.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 05 2020, @08:18PM (2 children)
Different AC, but it isn't uncommon for anti-abortion activists to assault women and staff of clinics. They also have people who stand outside of abortion clinics on abortion days and take their pictures. Then they share the photos on various "prayer groups" where the members then track down the women and dox them in order to allow the women to better pray for them, as apparently God is powerless to help the women unless they prayer-giver knows their name, address, job, etc. It is just pure coincidence that shortly after that information is revealed, those women have people show up at their door to proselytize and vandalize, receive hate mail and complaints at work, and are physically assaulted. It has gotten so bad that one of the nearby clinics sends volunteers to chauffeur you and cover your face with a balaclava and hoodie at the entrance to cut down on the amount of identifying information they provide.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday January 07 2020, @04:34PM (1 child)
How is this being allowed? This is harassment. These people should be either in jail or, at minimum, in a psych ward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:45AM
A combination of being hard to prove, easy to deflect onto the lone wolves who take it to far, political pandering to single-issue voters, and fear of railroading by the "persecuted" religious people who do it. I mean, seriously, look at the responses to what happens when someone blows up an abortion clinic or murders a doctor. If those people are fine with that because it serves the "greater good" or "it's God's will/command," imagine how they feel about the relatively innocent doxing, harassment, stalking, etc. Not to mention the whole thing you get into when it is literally the police/sheriff/politician/rich person or their family doing it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 04 2020, @02:53AM
Knowledge is power, and technology has made it easy to record, store, and mine incredible amounts of data. I really think we're going to have to give up a great deal of privacy, and work on enhancing other rights. Most especially, the right not to be discriminated against. We need more access to and control of data on ourselves. We need more acceptance of a much wider range of behaviors, don't criminalize or stigmatize so many things, cut out all the fascism. For instance, no more War on Drugs. Traffic laws are broken all the time, and most of the violations are no big deal. So you went 5 over the speed limit, so what?
We also plain need more acceptance of some aspects of what and who we are. Specifically, marital infidelity is everywhere. We've never come to terms with it, instead decreeing that monogamy is what God intended, is a worthy ideal, then trying (and failing horribly) to live up to it. As apes go, we are not monogamous, we are mildly promiscuous. At least things have loosened up. Divorce is not the stigma it was in the 1950s. Still often vicious and bitter, but much normalized.
Other things about ourselves need more careful handling. Our natural competitiveness should be firmly restrained to non-destructive ways. A sports contest or a game, yes. A shootout, with real bullets and high odds of at least one fatality, no. One thing that bothered me a little about living in an all male dorm was that we were a perfect target for any education hating incel who got the notion that his odds of getting a woman could be improved by destroying the dorm and killing everyone in it, provided he wasn't caught.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @02:53AM
If I had to guess when she was checking a bag. "Can I see your drivers license?" Scan scan scan...
Or she stands at a kiosk getting her boarding pass. scan scan scan....
Creepy as fuck though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Saturday January 04 2020, @03:16AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jb on Saturday January 04 2020, @07:06AM (8 children)
The real tragedy of all this is that, when you think about it, the airline has no valid, logical reason whatsoever to "verify" the identities of passengers in the first place.
Yes, they do need to verify that the passenger's ticket has been paid for and that the passenger has shown up at the airport on time. That's fair enough, to protect themselves from fare evaders. But that's what check-in is for (or at least it was, before the introduction of the completely meaningless process of "online check-in").
And if the passenger has checked baggage, yes they do need to be able to match the baggage to the passenger accurately, so if a passenger checks in but fails to board they can remove the passenger's baggage from the plane before take-off. That's fair enough too, for obvious reasons.
But none of those things require knowing (far less "verifying") a passenger's identity. They could just as easily be done using some unique number generated by the airline at ticket purchase time (isn't that what "ticket numbers" used to be for?).
The only people at airports who do have a legitimate need to check identities are the authorities at border control (customs & immigration desks; and maybe also departure tax collection points for those few places that still have them), which (at least everywhere I've ever been) are completely separate processes from anything the airline needs to be involved in.
Therein lies the real problem -- collectively, we (the travelling public) have waited far too long to start objecting to these pointless invasions of privacy -- we should have started doing that decades ago -- what we're seeing now is just the logical consequence of allowing all the previous rounds of violations through virtually unopposed.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @07:18AM (3 children)
No you see it saves time, from when you get in line to board to when you get in line in the tunnel while boarding. You're saving so much.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jb on Saturday January 04 2020, @07:46AM (2 children)
Nonsense.
Compare the time it used to take to catch an international flight before anything was automated (say, in the late 1970s, for example) with the time it takes with "advanced automation" today.
Sure, with a few of the dodgiest airlines (those who were too miserly to hire enough staff) we sometimes had to spend a long time in the check-in queue. But after that everything was pretty much plain sailing.
"Automation saves time" is not a universal truth -- never has been, never will be.
Oh, and:
is yet another example of fake convenience, at least at most airports (with some notable exceptions -- e.g. the SQ terminal at the old Changi Airport in Singapore was the only place I've ever seen nose-in parking "done right" -- amazing how fast you can fill/empty a 747 when the aerobridge connects to every door on one side of a plane).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 04 2020, @10:05AM
I'm pretty sure Poe's law applies here.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday January 04 2020, @01:48PM
Look up any "informational" airline-written type site about these things and that is exactly what they will say.
They exist to "speed things up", to "keep you safe", it's all for "your benefit", "it's got what plants crave", and so on. The average idiot out there literally believes this crap. The really scary thing now is that we are well past the point that anyone who questions it risks making themselves look like a terrorist.
(Score: 4, Informative) by choose another one on Saturday January 04 2020, @12:00PM (1 child)
Yeah, but no.
Once you go international shit gets complicated, and particularly by air because on landing you are already _in_ the destination country when you get to the border control - not true at most land borders and even at sea ports you _can_ be prevented from disembarking to land. Some countries started to incur large costs due to some people figuring out (en masse) that destroying ID documents and/or instant claim of asylum means you don't automatically get sent straight back where you came from if you don't have the right documents for entry.
Guess what (some of at least) those countries did? - dump (some of) those costs right back on the airlines as fines for flying in passengers without correct documents. So, often (possibly even typically) the airline _does_ have a legitimate, significant, financial/business interest in ensuring you and your identity documents match up and are valid for destination. The fact that this interest is, in effect, delegated down from border control through threat of fines doesn't make it any less legitimate.
The alternative is pre-clearance for destination country at the departure gate. There are places this happens - look at the Channel Tunnel arrangements for instance - but I don't see that happening any time soon for air travel. The sheer number of staff and secured systems from each destination country required to be at each originating airport just isn't feasible. Technology might fix that in future, but even so all it will do is move one of the queues to the other end of the journey (having used the Channel Tunnel many times I can testify as to the effect).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @06:07PM
But they're not checking identification or documents - that's the whole damn point. They're identifying you through video. So... you can still get through without the documents, or destroy them, or claim asylum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @12:06PM
How else will they report to the government exactly who took a flight?
Not hyperbole. A terrorist in Australia used his brother's passport to escape the country.
https://www.9news.com.au/world/sydney-jihad-teen-leaves-country-on-brother-passport/78d3c2b3-db6c-4af4-893c-8fa706984c09 [9news.com.au]
Go figure.
You have to wonder what our would look like without islam.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday January 04 2020, @03:23PM
You forgot enforcing ticket terms and conditions against hidden-city ticketing [thepointsguy.com]. This is rooted in a pricing practice through which some airlines charge less for a flight from city A to C connecting at B than a flight from city A to B. Identifying a passenger lets an airline theoretically charge a more competitive fare for connecting flights because the price doesn't have to cover the possibility that the passenger will give the B to C leg to someone else.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Saturday January 04 2020, @03:25PM
I read the featured article, and the following would have been a less clickbait headline:
"Airline Uses Passport Photos to Identify Boarding Passengers' Faces"
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday January 04 2020, @06:58PM
Homeland security has been consolidated, and is now over border control and the secret service.
Stephen Miller is in the administrative chain of Bernie Sander's bodyguards.
They are implementing as much of this as fast as they possibly can, it is a power grab and they will use it when they try to end the constitution this year.
You can of course assume that these 'security' systems will allow the police state and spies to operate in complete freedom, and for the records in the event of any accident to be completely fungible after the fact.
They are not just eliminating the means to verify our own lives with a paper trail, they are eliminating the means to verify anything with a paper trail.
And should there be a sufficient emf burst, get ready for cannibalism in around 48 hours.
thesesystemsarefailing.net (by which I mean the ones that enable a handful of people to control the rest of us, and epstein)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @08:45PM
if you are a US citizen and you tolerate the TSA you are a common street hooker and you can shove your feigned surprise about lack of privacy and sovereignty right up your money hole.