Airline Scans Your Face For Boarding. Few Rules Govern How That Data Can Be Used

schwit1 writes: The program makes boarding an international flight a breeze: Passengers step up to the gate, get their photo taken and proceed onto the plane. There is no paper ticket or airline app. Thanks to facial recognition technology, their face becomes their boarding pass.

The problem confronting thousands of travelers, is that few companies participating in the program, called the Traveler Verification Service, give explicit guarantees that passengers’ facial recognition data will be protected.

And even though the program is run by the Department of Homeland Security, federal officials say they have placed no limits on how participating companies — mostly airlines but also cruise lines — can use that data or store it, opening up travelers’ most personal information to potential misuse and abuse such as being sold or used to track passengers’ whereabouts.

Two senators, Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, have urged the Department of Homeland Security to stop the expansion of the larger effort until their privacy concerns are addressed.

In a letter sent to the agency in December, the senators said that the system “appears not to have the proper safeguards to prevent the spread of this data to third parties or other government agencies.”