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Comment by resonanttoe | Hacker News Reader

The point this article misses entirely is that the Facial recognition system is now at the gate which is ostensibly Delta’s territory.

It isn’t US Boarder Control running the facial control system, its Delta, Southwest, or anyone else, which has implications about the privacy of the biometric data, that up until this point hasn’t been collected by Airlines, only Boarder entities.

That said, in order to boot strap this system, Delta et., al. would have had to either; 1. Build their own database of biometric and facial data that they believe was reliable (unlikely) 2. Get a full and continually updated copy from CBP (Probably noisy) 3. Use an API made available by CBP that acts as a Biometric/Facial oracle.

I’ve heard rumblings that it’s 3, but I can’t cite anything to back that claim up, so grains of salt.

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My understanding is that biometric data are contained in your passport, which is already scanned by airlines when you check in and/or board planes.

Here they are using this information to automatically check that it is in fact you instead of having a staff member look at you and check against your passport's photo.

Yeah, the chip includes a 12-30kB JPEG with the person's photo: https://readid.com/blog/face-images-in-ePassports

I’m not certain of the particular setup here (per airport thing) but I’ve never had them scan my passport at the gate in a US Airport, only at Immigration checkpoints for international travel and TSA.

This is especially true for domestic travel as well.

For international flights, they traditionally scan your passport at the check-in counter.

As a US citizen, this is mostly just to validate any visa requirements for the country you're traveling to.

However, for non citizens, this data gets sent to CBP to create an exit record. I believe the concern is that between the check-in counter and the flight, you could trade places with someone to effectively overstay a visa without CBP's computer systems noticing (since you'd have a valid exit record)... hence the push for facial recognition at the gate.

But were you facially scanned?

At Immigration: Scanned, no, Photographed, yes. (So depending on your definition)

At TSA, They scan the first page of passport (or local ID) and usually Full body scan. So in the strict sense of facially scanned no.

At the gate (until now), neither. They would scan the boarding pass and eyeball the passport if international.

Again the point here is that in the first two instances these are Government agencies doing the scanning. At the third, the Government no longer has anything to do with it.

The question with this stuff is how and where are Airlines (private companies) getting a database of biometric data and what are they doing with it?

They submit the data to the CBP database and get a result back. It will help to validate exit reporting and ensure that the right people are being reported as leaving the country on their I-94s

Yes I suspect this, but the consumer has no way of verifying this. Similarly it also means that the airlines have access to a Face Oracle and can build their own database with confidence based on that result.

Neither of which are good.

> Delta’s territory This feels like the opposite of the GDPR stories from a few months ago. Instead of all the "It's coming" hype and opt in agreements, the company just gets the info without a fuss...

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