What Your Airline Won't Tell You About Those Creepy Airport Face
Scanners
Last week, a Twitter conversation between an airline
passenger and JetBlue went viral after she asked about the company's creepy
facial recognition cameras. Mostly, the passenger seemed shocked to learn
airlines were scanning customers' faces at all.
"Instead of scanning my
boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera," wrote writer
MacKenzie Fegan. "Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to
me? Did I consent to this?"
Fegan had a lot of questions about the
program, and JetBlue's official Twitter account didn't offer many answers. As
alarming as airport face scanners may be, however, their rollout across the U.S.
has hardly been secret. And there's a lot we can tell you about them that
airlines' customer service agents never will.
Facial scanners
are already at more than a dozen U.S. airports
The use of facial
recognition in American airports has been spearheaded by U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP)-part of the Department of Homeland Security-which has been
testing these systems as part of its "Biometric Exit" program since 2015. The
initiative scans the faces of passengers taking international flights out of the
U.S. and matches them to identity photos the CBP has on file.
Earlier
this month, Homeland Security said it plans to scan the faces of "over 97
percent" of departing international passengers by 2023. According to Buzzfeed,
17 U.S. airports are currently part of the program.
"Since its inception,
over two million passengers on over 15,000 flights have used the technology on
exit," the agency boasted earlier this month. By the end of 2021, CBP has been
given the goal of scanning the faces of passengers on 16,300 flights per
week.
Some major airlines are enthusiastic
partners
Both airports and airlines have been all too happy to
participate in the scheme. JetBlue, Delta, Lufthansa, British Airways and, most
recently, American Airlines have all tested CBP face scanners on their
customers. These airlines emphasize that passengers can choose to opt out, but
as Fegan's case illustrates, this option isn't always clear to customers. (Delta
has said less than two percent of fliers at one terminal opted out of face
recognition.)
JetBlue and Delta have even gone one step further,
giving passengers more opportunities to have their faces scanned. In November,
Delta debuted what it called America's "first biometric terminal" in Atlanta,
celebrating an (optional!) "end-to-end Delta Biometrics experience" that would
use facial recognition for check-in, bag check, TSA identification, and
boarding. And in December, JetBlue told Travel Weekly it planned to install two
"self bag drop" machines in New York that would scan passengers' faces and check
them against CBP data.
We don't know how facial data collected by
airlines is protected
While CBP has said it will only keep facial
exit scans for a maximum of 14 days, the rules for partner airlines are vaguer.
Speaking to the New York Times last summer, a CBP official said that while he
doubted airlines would want to keep fliers' biometric data, it "would really be
up to them."
More recently, CBP claimed in December that it has
"developed business requirements which do not allow approved partners to retain
the photos they collect." If so, these requirements do not appear to have been
made public, and it's unclear when they were instituted.
In a statement
to Gizmodo, a CBP spokesperson said "only CBP has access to this biometric data"
and "no personally identifiable information associated with biometrics" is ever
shared with partner companies. For their part, JetBlue, Delta, and American
Airlines have said that they don't retain facial scans and say they are sent
directly to CBP for matching.
In a 2017 report, Georgetown Law's Center
on Privacy and Technology noted that by partnering with private companies,
Homeland Security makes it easier for these companies to track travelers for
their own business interests.
"[D]espite the risk that airlines will use
biometric exit data and technology for their own tracking purposes, [the agency]
has not published any guidelines for or agreements with its private partners,"
wrote the authors.
It's not clear why Homeland Security even
needs to scan faces
As its name suggests, the Biometric Exit program
scans people leaving the country. How this makes us any safer is difficult to
explain. The government seems to believe that knowing-100 percent, for sure-when
people legally admitted to the U.S. have left is important enough to scan
everyone's face.
In a recent report, Homeland Security bragged that the
program has biometrically confirmed "over 7,000" cases of people leaving the
country after their visas expired-again, leaving. Out of 2 million passengers,
that's a hit rate of about 0.0035 percent.
Asked what the Biometric Exit
program does that traditional verification can't, a CBP spokesperson told
Gizmodo that facial scans help the agency secure the border, identify persons of
interest, and improve statistical reporting. Additionally, the spokesperson said
it was convenient for travelers.
Facial recognition tech has
repeatedly shown racial and gender bias
Over and over again, facial
recognition systems have been found to be less accurate when identifying women
and people with dark complexions. Just last year, the ACLU found that Amazon's
face-scanning system matched 39 percent of non-white U.S. representatives to
mugshot photos.
When it comes to CBP's face-scanning program, we don't
even know how biased it may or may not be. Asked if the CBP's facial scans had a
disparate impact on any demographic groups, a CBP spokesperson told Gizmodo the
agency was "still looking further into this question." (A CBP official gave a
similar answer in 2017.)
Facial recognition isn't just coming to
airports
While airports might be the place where this creepy tech is
being introduced the most rapidly, all kinds of industries are excited about the
possibilities of facial recognition. Companies in the U.S. have tested out
face-scanning kiosks designed to do everything from track fast food customers to
secretly identify Taylor Swift stalkers.
Just last month, Twitter users
were disturbed by a facial recognition kiosk in a Chinese airport that appeared
to be passively scanning passersby. The New York Times recently reported that
police in that country are now specifically requesting systems that can identify
faces belonging to members of the Uighur ethnic minority. If we don't demand
tighter rules on face scanning, this type of surveillance won't be surprising
anymore: It will just be normal.
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