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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
(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.