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Traveling this summer? Maybe don’t let the airport scan your face. (www.vox.com)

submitted 5 months ago by AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Travelers can opt out of facial recognition at US airports by requesting manual ID verification, though resistance or intimidation may occur.
Facial recognition poses privacy risks, including potential data breaches, misidentification, and normalization of surveillance.
The Algorithmic Justice League's "Freedom Flyers" campaign aims to raise awareness of these issues and encourage passengers to exercise their right to opt out.

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[–] player2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You're already on hundreds of cameras by walking into any airport in the world. Do they need your consent to run facial recognition software on the security footage?

[–] Uli@sopuli.xyz 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I used to work for a company that did various kinds of biometric recognition. I unfortunately was paraded past these cameras many times for testing purposes, so my face was compromised many moons ago.

We had two kinds of products we installed in airports. When looking at large crowds most airports wanted cameras that would monitor the flow of traffic, determining if there were any bottlenecks causing people to arrive at their gate (or baggage claim) after their luggage.

The other product was facial recognition for identification purposes. These are the machines you have to stand right next to. There are various legal reasons airports did not want to use any crowd-level cameras for identification. They hadn't obtained consent, but also, the low resolution per face would lead to many more false positives. It was also too costly.

But we did have high def cameras installed in strategic locations at large music halls. These private companies were less concerned with privacy and more concerned with keeping banned individuals out of their property. In those cases, we registered faces of people who were kicked out for various reasons and ignored all other faces.

My point I guess is twofold: first, you might not be facially tracked in as many places as you think you are. Second, eventually you will be and there's not a whole lot we can do to stop it. For many years, Target has identified people with their payment card, used facial recognition to detect when they return to the store, and used crowd tracking to see where in the store you go (and sometimes they have even changed ad displays based on the demographics of people standing nearby).

Mostly, you will be identified and tracked when there is financial incentive to do so.