Your face or fingerprint could soon replace air ticket

TAKING a flight? You may soon be able to use your fingers or face to replace your boarding pass.

This week, Delta Airlines announced a new biometric identification pilot programme that will eventually let you use your fingerprints instead of a plane ticket. That followed a JetBlue announcement hours earlier that it is testing a programme in Boston that will match pictures of customers’ faces with the passport database maintained by US Custom and Border Protections.

Delta’s programme is in partnership with Clear, a company that already lets customers skip to the front of security lines without identification. To be eligible for the programme, one must be a member of Delta’s frequent flyer SkyMiles program and a Clear subscriber.

Clear keeps users’ biometric information for the term of their subscriptions. Users can ask for their information to be removed from the company’s servers and close their accounts at any time.

The airline has also announced it will use facial recognition technology for bag drops, with a pilot testing programme at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in the summer.

JetBlue’s programme works in concert with two entities: the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and a tech firm called SITA. Flyers at Boston’s Logan International Airport and Aruba’s Queen Beatrix International Airport will have the option of going into the normal boarding line, or one with a camera that will snap their picture. SITA will send that photo to the CBP, to match it against the agency’s database of passport and visa photos. The match process is instant, JetBlue said.

Neither JetBlue nor SITA has access to the photo database, and the airline will not store users’ biometric information, JetBlue confirmed in an email.

If the facial scan fails to work, passengers will be moved to the traditional line - so don’t travel without your ID just yet.

Using biometric data for identification may sound convenient, but people should consider some things before signing up, said Jeramie Scott, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. Neither company has released details on how the government may use information on when and where people’s faces have been scanned, he said, nor are there laws to prevent the government from using these types of programmes as part of larger surveillance plans.

“It’s a technology that can easily be used for mass, indiscriminate surveillance,” he said, of facial recognition technology. — Washington Post