Why Facial Recognition for boarding flights should be the least of your worries

Facial Recognition as identification is becoming more common, but it is only a small piece of a much bigger issue

There have been countless articles published in the last few months about the increasing use of Facial Recognition at the airport, with a specific concern related to using biometric data for aircraft boarding. These articles tend to ignore the reality of modern air travel (voluminous data is already collected about you when you register for a passport, are issued a driver’s license, buy a ticket, and set foot at the airport) and rely on very out of date and misleading statistics to make a point about the biases of facial recognition. The bottom line is yes, you should be worried about collection of private data when it comes to air travel, but no, facial recognition for boarding aircraft should not be of particular concern.

A recent Wired article “I OPTED OUT OF FACIAL RECOGNITION AT THE AIRPORT — IT WASN’T EASY” is a case in point. The author, Allie Funk made several points related to the difficulty of opting out of facial recognition, the inherent biases of facial recognition software, and the safety and usage of databases maintained by the government containing biometric data. Though also seemingly relevant to the discussion, Ms. Funk did not really delve into the impact of biometric screening in terms of improving security or in streamlining air travel, which could have provided a more balanced view of why…