Your Face or Fingerprint Could Soon Replace Your Plane Ticket (washingtonpost.com)

Headed on a trip? You may soon be able to ditch your boarding pass in favor of your fingers or face. From a report: Delta announced, on Wednesday, a new biometric identification pilot program that will eventually let you use your fingerprints instead of a plane ticket (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). That followed a JetBlue announcement hours earlier that it is testing a program in Boston that will match pictures of customers' faces with the passport database maintained by U.S. Custom and Border Protections. Delta's program, which kicked off at Washington's Reagan National Airport, is in partnership with Clear, a company that already lets customers skip to the front of security lines without identification.

Comments

Security Is All Set

[micahraleigh]

If your finger prints get stolen, just get some new fingers.

Simple !

Re:Security Is All Set

[Altrag]

Depending on the resolution of the camera and the training of the software's neural nets, the facial recognition can actually do much better than a person. There's a lot of stuff our brains just don't focus on, and there's a lot of detail that's too small for our eyes to really notice from any sort of distance, but a good enough camera will capture.

Of course also entirely possible for someone who knows enough about any particular software and how its been trained to trick it, as you can find plenty of demonstrations of if you google around a bit. And its also entirely possible for two people to really look similar enough that the software can't tell. And finally there will always be those edge cases that the software just wasn't trained on well enough and will confuse it.

But FR isn't really a joke anymore. We tend to think that people are 100% accurate at recognizing faces (police lineups and the such are based on this assumption) but the data shows that its really not true -- we're actually fairly bad at it.

But we have a few tricks to compensate: First, we only really pay attention to the faces of people we know. If we look at a picture with 10 people in it, we see John and Sarah whom we know, and 8 "others" that we don't know and don't care about. That's perfectly fine for our day to day activities where we mostly tend to ignore anyone we're not directly interacting with, but it doesn't do so great when you need to match a face against "one of 100,000 people."

The other trick we use is extra contextual information. If we know for sure that Sarah's at home and we go to the mall, any time we see someone who looks at Sarah, we can immediately shut it out because we know its not her (and of course if she changed her mind and DID come to the mall, this can lead us to not immediately recognizing someone we should be able to.) We can also use context such as knowing what kind of wardrobe our friends wear, the hairstyles they tend to prefer, etc. Our brains put all of this together to come up with a whole picture that just a headshot doesn't give us.

And of course if all else fails, we're really good at convincing ourselves its not our fault -- the light hit the person in a strange way or oh my goodness John has that exact same t-shirt or any of a dozen other excuses for why we just flat out got it wrong (we tend to do this for all failures of mental process of course, not just facial recognition -- our brains are wired to not admit our own faults.)

Anyway that turned out a lot more long-winded than I'd planned..

Faceprint...

[Frosty Piss]

Is this where the TSA slams you to the ground and drags you on the flight?.

How about more seating space instead?

[blahbooboo]

Tickets and electronic tickets work fine. This isn't an issue. How about give us more space on the planes instead of spending money on this stuff?

Re:Valujet

[Anonymous Coward]

Valujet used to let you just walk up and give your name, no paperwork required. Those were the days.

They turned me away when I would walk up to them and tell them my name was Anonymous Coward. ... still works everytime nowadays to get a free prostate exam.

How convenient!

[Anubis IV]

Now they can just use the fingerprints they have on file to unlock your phone during their all-too-common border searches, rather than having to rely on your cooperation.

The vendor wants to sell a mugshot database

[davecb]

After all, the CIA shouldn't be the only folks with one, that's money left on the table.

It wil only be sold to nice people like airlines, of course!

A nonexistent problem?

[bluegutang]

They already don't check ID at the gate. They just scan the boarding pass (NOT "plane ticket") like you would scan a bar code in a supermarket. How would getting your face scanned be any faster than this?

If you want to speed up the boarding process, you could just have more gate agents scanning boarding passes. But this probably wouldn't help, because usually the bottleneck is on the plane, where passengers are finding their seats and loading the overhead compartments. Frequently there is a line in the jetway of passengers whose boarding passes have been scanned, who are waiting for a chance to get into the plane.

If you really wanted to speed boarding, you would add a second jetway entrance at the back end of the plane, to double the rate at which people could board.

A simpler fix would be to board the last few rows in the plane first rather than last, so that passengers storing their bags above rows 1-10 wouldn't block passengers who want to get to rows 11-30.

It's an opt-in program

[Gravis Zero]

For everyone who is flailing after reading this, you should know that this is an opt-in only program. "It's opt-in... for now" is a valid argument but if you don't like it, you can avoid airplanes. I've taken one in the last 10 years and frankly I didn't care for the experience and thus have not done so again. You can do the same, it's totally up to you.

Re:It's an opt-in program

[Gravis Zero]

Don't like the government tracking everything you do?

It's not the government that is tracking everything you do, it's corporations.

Well, you can live in isolation on a mountain top disconnected from the rest of the world, with no electronic devices whatsoever, and no contact with any other human being. It's totally up to you.

You can have electronic devices and have privacy, just not networked ones. The ones that are networked will be tracked. There is little reason to not talk to people unless you fear they are going to post it on facebook. Also if you care about people knowing what you buy then you should always use cash.

Re:It's an opt-in program

[Gravis Zero]

However, if I am using Windows 10 - something I paid $150 for - then it is certainly not reasonable for me to think that the OS will collect my data and use it for advertising. "It's my own fault" does not apply - perhaps I need to use Windows 10 for work and have no choice in the matter.

If you have to use it at work then only use it at work. Other than that, you don't have to use it.

I tried that

[Cro Magnon]

When I presented my finger, I was attacked by the TSA. Maybe I used the wrong one.