Digital rights folks, as you can imagine, want the tech grounded
America’s Transportation Security Agency (TSA) intends to expand its facial-recognition program used to screen US air travel passengers to 430 domestic airports in under a decade.
The TSA’s program, which uses Idemia’s biometric technology, has come under fire from some privacy and civil-rights organizations, which argue the software amounts to large-scale surveillance that does little to stop terror in the skies.
The government agency, unsurprisingly, has a differing opinion of its facial-recognition systems, currently being trialed at 25 airports across the country. Its abilities have been assessed over the past two years, and the system has boosted identity verification efficiency without infringing on travelers’ privacy rights, a TSA spokesperson told us.
The technology essentially scans a passenger’s face, and automates the process of checking that the person showing up to catch a flight is who they say they are, that they are the person expected to be there, and that they’re not subject to any additional security checks or barred from flying entirely.
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lennyesq 