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Faces Are Being Scanned At US Airports With No Safeguards on Data Use (nytimes.com)
schwit1 writes:
The program makes boarding an international flight a breeze: Passengers step up to the gate, get their photo taken and proceed onto the plane. There is no paper ticket or airline app. Thanks to facial recognition technology, their face becomes their boarding pass.... The problem confronting thousands of travelers, is that few companies participating in the program, called the Traveler Verification Service, give explicit guarantees that passengers' facial recognition data will be protected.
And even though the program is run by the Department of Homeland Security, federal officials say they have placed no limits on how participating companies -- mostly airlines but also cruise lines -- can use that data or store it, opening up travelers' most personal information to potential misuse and abuse such as being sold or used to track passengers' whereabouts.
The Department of Homeland Security is now using the data to track foreigners overstaying their visas, according to the Times. "After passengers' faces are scanned at the gate, the scan is sent to Customs and Border Protection and linked with other personally identifying data, such as date of birth and passport and flight information."
But the face scans are collected by independent companies, and Border Protection officials insist they have no control over how that data gets used.
And even though the program is run by the Department of Homeland Security, federal officials say they have placed no limits on how participating companies -- mostly airlines but also cruise lines -- can use that data or store it, opening up travelers' most personal information to potential misuse and abuse such as being sold or used to track passengers' whereabouts.
The Department of Homeland Security is now using the data to track foreigners overstaying their visas, according to the Times. "After passengers' faces are scanned at the gate, the scan is sent to Customs and Border Protection and linked with other personally identifying data, such as date of birth and passport and flight information."
But the face scans are collected by independent companies, and Border Protection officials insist they have no control over how that data gets used.
People who did not pay their tax and wanted to sneak out of the USA on "another" passport. :)
:)
Illegal migrants who thought their "new" passport would never get cross referenced with any other US database.
People who asked for "protection" in the USA going back for a holiday in the nation they "escaped" from for a few months.
Criminals who created an entire fake life with a entire new passport ID story suddenly get detected from that old city/state police image
Database sharing and reconciliation between city/state/federal systems is going to find a lot of faces who would have been ok if they had not risked international travel
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"