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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: 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.