SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.