Face, finger to replace ticket
HEADED on a trip? You may soon be able to ditch your boarding pass in favour of your fingers or face. Last Wednesday, Delta 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 meme in Boston that will match pictures of customers’ faces with the passport database maintained by US Custom and Border Protections.
Delta’s programme, which kicked off at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, 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 programme and a Clear subscriber.
The first phase of Delta’s programme will allow its elite-tier passengers to use their fingerprints, rather than their boarding passes, to enter member lounges. A planned second phase would allow Delta frequent flyers to use their fingerprint in lieu of a boarding pass. Per its privacy policy, which will cover the Delta programme, 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, said JetBlue.
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
‘It’s a technology that can be used for indiscriminate surveillance’
of larger surveillance plans.
“It’s a technology that can be used for indiscriminate surveillance,” he said of facial recognition technology.
“Any use for facial recognition for something like this – where it’s the government or companies running a facial recognition search on people – needs to be scrutinised very closely by the public, because of the serious risk of mission creep.”
US authorities have yet to comment on developments.