“Your Face is Your Boarding Pass” is the headline from a jetBlue press release from November 15, 2018. “JetBlue continues to lead the industry as the first domestic airline to launch a fully-integrated biometric self-boarding gate for international flights…”
Journalist MacKenzie Fegan had first-hand (first-face?) experience with the new procedure, and when she asked jetBlue about it on Twitter, the extraordinary correspondence resulted:
I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight. Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge. Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to me? Did I consent to this?
— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019
You’re able to opt out of this procedure, MacKenzie. Sorry if this made you feel uncomfortable.
— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) April 17, 2019
Follow up question. Presumably these facial recognition scanners are matching my image to something in order to verify my identity. How does @JetBlue know what I look like?
— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019
The information is provided by the United States Department of Homeland Security from existing holdings.
— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) April 17, 2019
So to be clear, the government provided my biometric data to a privately held company? Did I consent to this? How long is my data held by @JetBlue? And even if I opt out at the scanners…you already have my information, correct?
— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019
We should clarify, these photos aren’t provided to us, but are securely transmitted to the Customs and Border Protection database. JetBlue does not have direct access to the photos and doesn’t store them.
— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) April 17, 2019
Would love more info about how my image was matched to a name on the flight manifest. I looked at the camera & a few seconds later the gate opened. Was my image, in the space of those seconds, sent to CBP, run through a database, matched to a name, and then sent back to @JetBlue?
— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019
You can learn more about the process here: https://t.co/wDZYiNNhoY.
— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) April 17, 2019
“There is no pre-registration required.” I’ll say! This press release really doesn’t tell me anything about how it works. @EFF, can you shed some light on this? How concerned should I be?
— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019
We found another article that might be interesting to you: https://t.co/yT1v05VRYX It talks a bit about the data and how it’s processed.
— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) April 18, 2019
“It took her photo, comparing her picture to a preloaded photo database of all the passengers with tickets on this flight.” It sounds like opting out isn’t really an option. I can not go through the scanner, but my data will have already been accessed and loaded into a database.
— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 18, 2019
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mark frauenfelder
Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the founding editor-in-chief of MAKE. He is a research director at <a href="Kevin J. Anderson has written more than 125 books, including 52 national or international bestsellers. He has over 23 million books in print worldwide in thirty languages. He has been nominated for the Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, Shamus Award, and Silver Falchion Award, and has won the SFX Readers' Choice Award, Golden Duck Award, Scribe Award, and New York Times Notable Book; in 2012 at San Diego Comic Con he received the Faust Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is a research director at Institute for the Future and editor-in-chief of Cool Tools and co-founder of Wink Books. Twitter: @frauenfelder.
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