Frequent flyer: should travellers cheer or fear facial recognition?

| Financial Times 6/23/19, 03*12

Opinion Travel

Frequent flyer: should travellers cheer or fear facial

recognition?
Airports are beginning to entrust the entire boarding process to computers

MICHAEL SKAPINKER

© AFP

Michael Skapinker JUNE 10, 2019

“We will be boarding by group number.” The shuffle to the gate to hand over your passport and
boarding pass to an airline staff member will soon be gone.

Airports worldwide are moving to boarding by facial recognition. A camera will decide whether you
are the person you say you are before it lets you on to your flight.

Delta Air Lines introduced facial recognition boarding at Atlanta airport in December. London’s
Heathrow airport will introduce facial recognition boarding gates on a trial basis this summer.

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Frequent flyer: should travellers cheer or fear facial recognition? | Financial Times 6/23/19, 03*12

These projects are part of an airport overhaul that will mean having your face scanned as you arrive
at the airport to ensure it matches the picture in your passport — and then passing through face
scanning at every stage, from check-in to security to boarding.

“The long-term aim of the technology will be for passengers to be able to walk through the airport
without breaking their stride,” said Heathrow in a press release. Preliminary trials have shown that
“feedback has been tremendously positive”.

They would say that. What should we passengers think? I can see three issues: safety, convenience
and privacy.

Safety first. When I board an aircraft at Heathrow currently, no one really knows who I am. I check
in online and do not drop any luggage off as I carry it with me. My pre-printed boarding pass lets
me into the security queue and my boarding pass and passport allow me on to the plane. The
airline employee who checks my passport — the first time anyone has done so — does it to ensure
that it has the same name as my boarding card. They do not verify that the passport is mine and,
unless the photo in it diverges wildly from my appearance, probably lack the training.

The only time anyone has a good look at me and my passport, either in person or electronically, is
when I arrive at immigration control after landing.

So, in principle, a more rigorous identification

process is right. Privacy is important, of which more
The city of San Francisco has below. But I would like to think that airlines know
banned facial recognition exactly who is on their flights.
technology …but airlines are
Are machines better at matching faces to passport
not only entitled to know
pictures? For all the talk of a seamless biometric
who we are; they have a journey through the airport, we know it doesn’t work
duty to that way. The gates sometimes don’t recognise your
face. The technology may be improving. It is not there
yet.

This has an impact on the likely convenience of electronic boarding. If there are hold-ups because
the cameras aren’t recognising passengers, queues will grow longer. Facial recognition will allow
the airlines to employ fewer boarding staff but it’s not clear that the process will be any quicker.

Finally, privacy. This is a huge issue in the streets outside, where people have raised objections to
being photographed without permission. The city of San Francisco has banned facial recognition

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Frequent flyer: should travellers cheer or fear facial recognition? | Financial Times 6/23/19, 03*12

technology. It has no control over airport security, which is a federal matter, and when we get on to
an aircraft the issues are different. As I’ve said, the airlines are not only entitled to know who we
are; they have a duty to know.

The question is what they do with that information and whether they sell it on to companies or
hand it to their governments to use for repressive purposes. Heathrow says it is bound by the EU’s
GDPR data protection rules, so will not sell our data on.

Not everyone will be that scrupulous. If we choose to fly, our faces will become someone else’s
property.

Follow Michael on Twitter @Skapinker or email him at michael.skapinker@ft.com

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