
JetBlue has started using facial recognition instead of boarding passes - blahedo
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-conversation-should-terrify-you-viral-thread-about-airport-tech-is-creeping-out-the-internet
======
bayesian_horse
I have to admit my naivety on this, but: What exactly is the problem here?

Both the airlines and the involved law enforcement have a right or even a duty
to know who you are when you are boarding the plane. They also have facial
recognition data, either from a passport photo or putting a camera in front of
the check-in, and arguably they have a right to that.

People walk around with their faces all the time. They post it on social
media. Would it be a problem if a security guard lets you through a gate
because he recognizes you? Is it more troublesome that all security guards of
the airline now can recognize you at the gate?

I think we need to be more precise about what exactly is spooking us and why.
Using facial recognition for boarding security is not as big as a problem as
facial recognition being used for law enforcement or whatever they do in China
now. But that's a topic for legislation and regulation. If companies are
prohibited from storing personal data without consent, that should be enough
to stop almost any legal infringement.

If such legislation is impossible, because your government is completely
unaccountable, or because companies are unaccountable to such laws, then that
is a much bigger problem than the potential for violations of privacy...

With regards to privacy I keep coming back to the conclusion that it is more
important and effective to improve and enforce regulations than to beat up on
particular technologies.

~~~
skohan
> I think we need to be more precise about what exactly is spooking us and
> why.

What's spooking _me_ is the normalization of facial recognition technology for
identification without adequate public agreement over what the limits of its
applications should be.

A machine recognizing me is _a lot different_ than a human recognizing me. If
a machine can recognize me, there can be cameras posted at every street
corner, and some organization can reconstruct my movements based on where and
when my face is pinged by the system.

It's sort of possible for humans with access to surveillance footage to do
that, but the amount of human effort required to accomplish it makes it
impossible to do at scale. An automated system could do this for everyone,
always.

~~~
bayesian_horse
So it's still not the problem that a machine can recognize you, but rather
that somebody is tracking and storing such recognitions.

Which is an entirely different thing. The former is a technological reality.
It's impossible to legislate away devices who can do that.

Tracking and storing personal data on the other hand, is very much within the
reach of regulation. The GDPR for example restricts this. Even if somebody has
devices who can recognize you is not allowed to store and track data about
such recognition incidences without your approval. In this particular case,
they don't need your approval because the camera is used in lieu of a boarding
pass, and the airline has every right and duty to know you are boarding right
now.

In case you are worried that the airline connects your travel patterns with
other companies interested in other patterns, well, that works with a boarding
pass or even a simple check mark on a pen-on-paper boarding list just fine.

~~~
skohan
Why do you insist that facial recognition technology could not be regulated?
It's _possible_ for anyone to go to a garden supply store and find the
ingredients to make home made explosives. In principal we can't stop people
from doing so, but that doesn't mean we can't make it illegal and impose
penalties on anyone who does it. It's a technological reality that I can watch
videos on my phone while driving, but we can still make it illegal to do so.

~~~
bayesian_horse
Making bombs in your backyards is much less popular and much more
consequential than recognizing images.

And image recognition happens completely in silicon. There is no way to know
from the outside if a device is recognizing patterns in image data, much less
differentiate between recognizing faces or dog breeds.

~~~
skohan
I'm not following your argument. There's also no way of knowing from the
outside if a device is storing identifying information to be shared with
advertisers or foreign governments. What's special about classifiers which
makes them unregulatable?

~~~
bayesian_horse
I think you are arguing, to try an analogy, that prohibiting any kind of face
recognition would be as worthwhile as prohibiting bomb building, while being
about equally difficult. I'm rejecting that premise.

And of course, storage and utilization of personal data is a lot easier to
regulate in a way that can be enforced. That's the main premise of the GDPR
legislation, by the way. Of course, criminal and negligent businesses can
totally abuse your personal data, often without consequences. But they can't
do so legitimately and they don't have access to the legal and open economy.

Even Facebook and Google are feeling the pain already. They do violate some
laws some of the time and they have a hard time hiding that, because hiding it
requires criminal intent itself, and it's really hard for hundreds of people
to keep such secrets, regardless how profitable.

~~~
skohan
1\. No, you have asserted multiple times in this discussion that it's
_impossible_ to regulate facial recognition technology. e.g:

> The former is a technological reality. It's impossible to legislate away
> devices who can do that[facial recognition].

Please explain that statement, as it seems like total nonsense to me. My point
about explosives is that just because something is "a technological reality",
or that there's no way to physically prevent people from implementing
something, that in no way makes it immune from legislation. We can legislate
whatever we want.

Here's a law which would make it impossible for JetBlue to implement this
system:

"No organization shall be permitted to use an automated system to identify
individuals using an image of their face."

2\. I think you're missing the point with your larger argument. It seems as if
you are saying: we should not be concerned about JetBlue's use of this
technology because this use-case in particular does not constitute the
dystopian Orwellian potential of facial recognition technology. The point is
not that this is the use-case which crosses that line, the point is that it is
a big step in that direction, and has happened without a public discussion of
where exactly the line should be.

3\. You say w.r.t. GDPR:

> Of course, criminal and negligent businesses can totally abuse your personal
> data, often without consequences. But they can't do so legitimately and they
> don't have access to the legal and open economy.

That's an argument in favor of regulating facial recognition technology itself
isn't it? We can allow the technology to be normalized, and just hope everyone
is following regulations about not abusing access to our personal data. But
given what has been revealed about PRISM and other government spying programs,
it's hard to imagine that such data would _not_ be abused if it existed. On
the other hand, we could agree not to make facial recognition a part of our
daily lives, or to put very careful boundaries around its use, and make it
that much harder for it to be abused.

------
mch82
How much longer will we allow our freedoms to be eroded?

People were flying without any photo ID until just a few years ago (except
internationally). We’ve given up so much freedom & so much of what made air
travel fun in exchange for so little.

We need to stop letting people scare us into giving away our freedoms.

~~~
thoughtfunction
For many years, I remember needed a piece of photo id with my ticket to get
through TSA security checkpoints. What were you able to do instead? Just give
a ticket?

~~~
djcapelis
You didn't even need that, you just walked through some metal detectors and
you could hang out near the gate and greet your loved ones coming off the
plane. You didn't need a ticket. You didn't need ID. You didn't even need an
intent to fly.

~~~
zizee
Most Australian domestic flights/airports are still like this.

Sidenote: entering/exiting both Aus and NZ recently, immigration checkpoints
in both countries did appear to make extensive use of facial recognition.

~~~
cyphar
Yes, this is also the case in Europe (EU passports go through automated gates
very similar to the Australia/NZ ones). Your passport contains biometric
information about your facial structure, and the facial recognition is used to
verify it.

Given the somewhat-recent studies[1] which show that the vast majority of
border guards (unless they happen to be "super-matchers") have a 1/7-or-worse
failure rate when trying to check a person's passport photo, I think it's
quite understandable to do the facial recognition electronically.

But such a system should only be used for immigration purposes (where identity
verification is very important to get right), not for getting onto a plane or
just coming into the waiting areas of domestic airports.

[1]:
[https://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4185916.htm](https://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4185916.htm)

------
skilled
I am guessing that the bigger concern here is that this is an 'enabler' tactic
to expand facial recognition in other areas of our lives. And if this is the
case, then there definitely needs to be some kind of ratification.

Maybe this is unrelated, but it's starting to feel like every bad accident in
this world is affecting us in this very strange way. For example, I was very
surprised to find that Sri Lanka cut everyone off from social media "just like
that". To think there are people with this kind of power seems a little
frightening to say the least.

But, what's even scarier is that these bombings and 'tragic' events tend to
steer us in a very controlling direction. _All of a sudden_ the government has
an incentive to enforce more control over its citizens and society as a whole.

~~~
zizee
This is not a new thing in American history, and probably predates America's
existence: [https://prospect.org/article/when-fear-threatens-
freedom](https://prospect.org/article/when-fear-threatens-freedom)

> The pattern of responding to threats by curtailing rights began early in
> American history. In 1798, when the future of the country was in doubt,
> Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Act, which made it a crime to falsely
> criticize the government or government officials—men were sent to prison for
> speaking ill of certain individuals and decisions.

------
jypepin
This sounds pretty insane indeed. How much should we be concerned about that?
The gvt already has our image data, and knows our moves anyway right? Even
without facial recognition, IDs and passports are asked when you travel, so
the documentation of your travels already exists I assume?

~~~
ahelwer
We should be very concerned, because this is obviously testing the waters
before rolling out ubiquitous facial recognition. I honestly and earnestly
believe that use of facial recognition technology should be banned in all its
forms. The applications are limited and the downsides are massive.

~~~
cocochanel
Could you please elaborate on the downsides? Gov't has your data since you
were born, complete with your photos, IDs, you name it. What makes you think
it's any different now?

~~~
ehnto
The difference is that ubiquitous facial recognition allows for near seamless
tracking of individuals and explicitly without a warrant or their consent.
It's an important milestone because it moves us from a "reasonable book
keeping" level of tracking to full blown seamless tracking and again
importantly, without our consent.

To imagine it a bit more viscerally, imagine instead that the system had no
cameras and instead required you to submit your daily movement report at the
end of each day. An agent walks from door to door and you hand him your
written report of exactly what you did today and that gets entered into the
Government Saftey and Oversight Commission Database. What are they going to
use all that data for? There are only a handful of good reasons, but a
disproportionate list of bad reasons that explicitly limit freedom.

Second to that. Would you be as comfortable going to a strip club or a fringe
political gathering or a conference for a controversial topic if you knew you
had to put it in your report? It has a chilling effect on freedom of movement
and pushes fringe activities that are perfectly safe and legal into the
darkness.

~~~
duckface
you people are pretty stupid. ATMs have tracking, point of point of sale has
tracking, your phone, internet it's all tracked and linked back to you.

~~~
justwalt
I think you’re right. Maybe we should skip the facial recognition and install
RFID tags behind our eyes, after all, they basically know all of that info
already anyways.

------
oyebenny
Can we not link to "IFLS"? They're a horrible Facebook fad follower site with
no real reverence for science. (-_-)

------
Jerry2
A related story that hasn't received much traction on HN:

>US wants to use facial recognition on air travelers leaving the country

[https://qz.com/1598148/us-wants-to-use-facial-recognition-
on...](https://qz.com/1598148/us-wants-to-use-facial-recognition-on-air-
travelers-leaving-the-country/)

~~~
Taniwha
wow a 97% success rate ... that means that 3% will be arrested for overstaying
their visa on return ....

The US is kind of unique in that it doesn't have immigration officers who
stamp your passport when you leave ... so you have no proof that you have left
... it also means that there are no transit lounges in the US, you can't land
in SFO from say Australia and get on a plane to London without passing through
US customs and spending time and money getting a US visa (even an ESTA takes
time and money)

At the moment the US depends on airlines to get it right, it used to be that
when you arrived they stapled a green bit of cardboard into your passport,
sometimes the airlines would forget to collect it as you left, or lose it and
people would end up getting arrested when they come back (a night or two in
the cells and thrown on a plane back home). For a while there were kiosks in
the departure lounge. Now days it's done electronically, and they still get it
wrong occasionally, the error rate however is probably way below 3% at the
moment.

The horror stories from people caught this way mean that people from Oz/NZ
often prefer to travel to Europe the other way around rather than risking US
travel

~~~
madeofpalk
> mean that people from Oz/NZ often prefer to travel to Europe the other way
> around rather than risking US travel

I mean, going via the US is 6 hours longer compared to going via Asia.

Sydney > Dubai > London is ~23 hours. Sydney > LA > New York is ~23 hours, and
then another 6 to get to London.

~~~
Taniwha
If you're going to London you would normally fly direct over the pole from
LAX/SFO, not stop in NY as well

------
oceliker
I think this is being blown a bit out of proportion. The government definitely
has your passport photo in a database. And since this facial recognition is
happening only at boarding gates of international flights, it’s totally
plausible that CBP has an isolated system, where Jetblue operates the device
but doesn’t get any of the data.

~~~
tdeck
But this is a great way to test and refine facial recognition to make it
ubiquitous, which has serious implications for the government's ability to
track everyone cheaply and with little recourse.

~~~
oceliker
I don’t think it provides a great way of testing and refining. The pictures
are taken at a very controlled environment in this case; it doesn’t really
generalize to CCTV. I don’t disagree with the argument regarding “normalizing”
facial recognition in everyday life, though.

------
swalsh
In the us, we've successfully avoided a gun registry (with the exception of a
few states) probably because gun ownership has such a direct connection with
the idea of a potential tyrannical government. But these types of systems are
going to be the true backbone of a tyrannical government. The gun community
has successfully built a lobby organization to maintain these freedoms (I'd
argue mostly through peer pressure.) Perhaps there's a model here that privacy
advocates can replicate.

------
alkonaut
If a private company says they'll take a picture of me at checkin and then
verify that at boarding vs the same picture - then destroy the picture, I'm
fine with that. It's a temporary storage of biometric data. I'm especially
fine with it if I can opt to go for a paper passport instead.

BUT

If a private company uses some database, especially a centralized/government
database, to do the same task - then it's absolutely dystopian.

~~~
skohan
Yes I think there's a ton of potential benefit for facial recognition in terms
of streamlining processes which require a lot of ID checks, like air travel,
but I would only be OK with it if they implemented it within some parameters
which should be enforced with regulation:

\- The identification step should be completely anonymized. I.e. the facial
recognition step is completely black-box. When I buy my ticket, I submit a
photo, and a token is produced which is shared with the airline, and they can
compare this token with one which is produced when I show my face at checkin.
Like with password storage, even if the facial recognition dataset were
somehow compromised, it should not give attackers a way to link my face with
my identity. And it should not be possible to type in my name and get to
pictures of my face.

\- The dataset used to identify me should have a finite lifetime (i.e. from
when I check in until the plane takes off) and should be verifiably destroyed
afterwards.

\- It should be possible to possible to opt-out and identify myself by other
means.

~~~
alkonaut
I don't think the big issue is the identity change between ticket purchase and
checkin, but between checkin and boarding. I.e. no photo is needed when buying
ticket. At the checkin step you show your face. When boarding you verify it.
Otherwise, I agree with what you said.

This type of biometric check of "the person dropping the bag is the person
boarding" has been in use for more than a decade e.g. on Scandinavian, and I
think it's basically fine if they use temporary and secure data storage.

The biometric verification didn't take place at all if you _didn 't_ check in
a bag.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines#Fingerpr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines#Fingerprint_biometric_identification)

~~~
skohan
Somehow I would trust Scandinavians to handle this better than, say, the US or
the UK. Those societies seem to have a better ethic around the public good
than others.

------
tommoor
Last time I came into SFO through Global Entry there was no passport scan
needed, just a quick look in the camera and it printed my receipt to enter the
country.

I've often thought that border control has the best time lapse of me aging

~~~
martin_
Interesting, how do you activate that flow? I landed at SFO last night and it
prompted for me to insert my passport before it'd scan my face / take finger
prints

~~~
hyeonwho4
Global Entry is a TSA program you can apply for. The TSA charges a fee of 100
USD and runs an in person interview.

Edit: those under investigation, warrants, or charged with crimes are not
elligible. Neither are those with passports from outside major US allies
(India Colombia UK Germany Panama Singapore Korea Switzerland Taiwan Mexico
Canada)

~~~
iancarroll
Global Entry is not a TSA program and it normally requires a physical travel
document to use the GE kiosks. Curious that there is now a facial recognition-
only kiosk.

Edit: looks like this in MIA? [https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-
release/global-e...](https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-
release/global-entry-celebrates-10-years-expediting-international-travel)

------
arno_app
That biometric data is stored by a government is a whole other discussion in
my eyes. If they provide a secure API that just let's you query through facial
data and return which passenger from the company provided list it is I'm fine
as long as the biometric data gets destroyed afterwards (the one provided to
the API). But of course how can I know this as a passenger. I like the idea to
make a process less painful but yeah it seems to have a lot of pitfalls

~~~
raxxorrax
Just scrap identification and 100% of security legislation from the last 20
years and you could have a perfect and smooth flying experience.

\----

Planes can make you and your whole family burn in a crash. So I guess that
makes you cry really hard every time you board a plane, because that is really
horrible.

It could also be attacked by terrorists, but that probability is even lower by
a few magnitudes. But since you already cried a lot, you just had enough and
had to implement a huge dragnet? This makes so much sense!

edit: I wish I could underline words on HN to underline the magnitude of
magnitude.

------
ElliotH
I tried this. It’s junk. So much slower than a boarding pass scan.

I’ve seen good setups for this like at the UK border. This is not the same.

Almost everyone got rejected and got looked at by staff, especially black
people who the machine seemed incapable of recognizing. Children? No chance.

I get it, there are privacy concerns which should rank higher, but you don’t
even need to pull them out here. This is just useless bad tech.

~~~
apexalpha
>I’ve seen good setups for this like at the UK border. This is not the same.

I was just going to say I've done this in the UK. You put your passport on a
scanner and look into the camera, took a full 5 seconds though, but since
there are many more of these than border guards it's still faster.

~~~
vultour
Those don't use facial recognition, it's a bunch of border guards behind a
wall manually evaluating if you match the data on the passport.

------
mattlondon
So how does this work for international travelers? Presumably the US
government does not have the entire world's passport photos? Or do they...?
Pretty worrying if so ... time for some GDPR requests maybe ...

I think at Gatwick in the UK they have a similar system where they take a
photo of you as you enter security and it is then checked again at the gate.
It does not work well if you are wearing glasses.

I wonder if some certain styles of eye wear would make facial recognition
significantly ineffective? Highly unsymmetrical with lenses opaque to IR etc.

~~~
blahedo
They have the passport photos from all US passports, plus all non-US people
who have entered the country through a legal port of entry. That should cover
everyone who's flying out of the country, right?

~~~
mirimir
Sure. Except for those who entered illegally.

But I'm not sure how far they'd get even now. I'm guessing that checks on do-
not-fly etc lists might already flag hem.

------
joe_the_user
I'd be as worried about false positives and false negatives as I would be
about losing privacy - and I would certainly be worried about that.

Of course, the security of actual boarding passes seems extremely flimsy
compared to the rest of airport security. The airlines could just take a
picture and do no more verification at all, and wind-up with current security.

~~~
6nf
False positives is not a big deal, if two people check in under the same name
it's easy to manually figure it out

~~~
stedaniels
I imagine the OP meant a nefarious third party using someone else's boarding
pass?

~~~
6nf
Is this not currently a problem too?

------
gumby
Why do airlines even need to know your name (much less your gender — remember
the press ballyhoo a few months ago when some airlines expanded their list
from male and female)?

I can see that they might want to know that each passenger has paid for the
seat but that’s about it.

------
thb567
So, many fears about surveillance infrastructure to be deployed for use cases
like this one are already too late to the party. That's already done, the
framework over all the apps are being deployed, like looking for faces to tell
who's who

------
outside1234
Presumably the government already has a list of people flying - do they really
need your photo to do a scan against a list of warrants for your arrest? And
do we not want them scanning that list against folks with a warrant for their
arrest?

------
nerdbaggy
How does Jet Blue know when you have opted out? By scanning your face, seeing
you have opted out, and prompt for the actual boarding pass?

------
ryanthedev
This is how it works. Airline takes multiple photos of you. Sends those photos
along with flight context data. Over secure lines. To Homeland. They match
photo to passport and passport info to flight manifest. All outside of the
airlines infrastructure. Or at least should be.

~~~
ryanthedev
If not passport could be drivers license. Or state id. Which would make sense
because they don't allow certain state IDs to fly anymore. Everybody had to
update.

~~~
tjohns
These are the CBP "Biometric Exit" kisoks, which are only for international
flights. Which means everybody on those flights will have a passport.

------
duckface
can someone please explain calmly why the fear-mongering, the hysteria and use
of the words terrify are justified about this?

~~~
markdown
Read this twitter conversation between a passenger and Jetblue:
[https://twitter.com/mackenzief/status/1118509708673998848](https://twitter.com/mackenzief/status/1118509708673998848)

------
purplezooey
Ha. Seen your average US airport lately? Most look like a scene from the third
world. Underfunded, dilapidated facilities coupled with cheapskate US
carriers. Good luck with that.

~~~
ben_w
Neither SFO nor JFK airport were as remotely dilapidated as Nairobi airport
when I saw them.

~~~
skohan
JFK does seem quite dated when comparing to most European capitals, or large
Asian hubs.

There are some high-standard modern terminals in the US too though.

~~~
chungleong
By "most European capitals", I presume you're excluding Paris :-)

~~~
skohan
I haven’t flown into Paris recently but there are plenty of exceptions:
Berlin’s not beautiful either (though it’s one of my favorite airports).

But still the standard in Europe seems higher in general than North America.

~~~
ben_w
I like Berlin Tegel, but Berlin Schönefeld always seemed to me to be its low-
budget brother.

~~~
skohan
Yeah I was speaking about Tegel. If you fly out of the main rotunda, it's
great because every gate has its own security and bag drop so there's no long
waits, even if it's busy. Schonefeld is like any other budget airport.

~~~
ben_w
Somehow I manage even month-long trips with just carry-on. With the sole
exception of the time I cycled from Hoek van Holland to Zürich and needed to
get back to the UK in a hurry, I think I’ve not had a check-in bag drop since
I was a kid.

------
tanilama
That is great,

