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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

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

Original Submission