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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.

3 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wait for the US wide database sharing by AHuxley · · Score: 1, Troll

    Citizens with their own passports who pay their tax on time can enjoy international travel AC.
    A criminal, an illegal migrant, a person with fake ID, a person who claimed protection going back to the nation they escaped will be detected.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  2. Is your face private? by Leuf · · Score: 1, Troll

    What exactly is someone going to do with a scan of your face? Is someone going to hack in and 3d print a facial mask of your face and then try to get through airport security with a plastic face? I just don't see what value this data has to anyone. I guess if you had data on a large enough group of people you could find people who are close enough matches to fool the system to yourself or other members of your group.

  3. Re: Wait for the US wide database sharing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    You deserve to be arrested for dui if you drive with allergy medicines in your blood. And you should be locked away for life. The humanity will benefit in the long run as hopefully you were caught and incarcerated before you had procreated your defective genes.