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.

Comments

Wait for the US wide database sharing

[AHuxley]

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 :)

Re: Wait for the US wide database sharing

[Zontar The Mindless]

So you think it's OK to strip someone of their lawful permanent resident status or even citizenship just because they came from a different country.

Thanks for confirming your xenophobia and disregard for the law. Not to mention your xenophobia and callousness. Oh, and your xenophobia, too.

Sure there are safeguards

[rsilvergun]

if you're very wealthy then nothing bad will happen to your data and it will be well cared for.

Oh, you meant for the rest of us? Well, if you're gonna make a two tiered justice system you've got to break some omelets or something.

Re:Is your face private?

[Zontar The Mindless]

No, they'll just use it to cross-reference your other data AND know that you're out of the country.

(Congratulations, you apparently don't know anything about databases AND you didn't even bother to read all of the summary before posting silly questions.)

Re:Is your face private?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Depends on who "they" are, and whether they have a legitimate reason to access such data.

The issue is not with the taking of images, using facial recognition tech, or knowing that you're in or out of the country. The issue is whom this information gets shared with, how it can be used by them, and what safeguards it's under.