Orlando International Airport to scan all faces on international flights
Orlando International Airport to scan faces of US
citizens
By MIKE SCHNEIDER June 21, 2018
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Florida’s busiest airport is
becoming the first in the nation to require a face scan of passengers on all
arriving and departing international flights, including U.S. citizens,
according to officials there.
The expected announcement Thursday at Orlando
International Airport alarms some privacy advocates who say there are no formal
rules in place for handling data gleaned from the scans, nor formal guidelines
on what should happen if a passenger is wrongly prevented from boarding.
Airports in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas,
Miami, New York and Washington already use face scans for some departing
international flights, but they don’t involve all international travelers at
the airports like the program’s expansion in Orlando would. The image from the
face scan is compared to a Department of Homeland Security biometric database that
has images of people who should be on the flight, in order to verify the
traveler’s identity.
U.S. citizens at these airports can opt out, but the
agency “doesn’t seem to be doing an adequate job letting Americans know they
can opt out,” said Harrison Rudolph, an associate at the Center on Privacy
& Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center.
U.S. citizens at the Orlando airport will be able to opt
out just like at the other airports if they don’t want to provide their
photograph, Jennifer Gabris, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection said in an email. However, a notice about a possible rule change for
the program states that “U.S. citizens may be required to provide photographs
upon entering or departing the United States.”
The Orlando announcement marks a step up in the scope of
the face scan program, Rudolph said.
“We’re not talking about one gate,” he said. “We’re
talking about every international departure gate, which is a huge expansion of
the number of people who will be scanned. Errors tend to go up as uses go up.”
Orlando International Airport had about 6 million
international passengers in the past year.
Rudolph said he has concerns about the face scans’
accuracy, since some research shows they are less accurate with racial
minorities, women and children. Researchers say this is because photos used to
train the face-scanning software underrepresent minorities, women and young
people.
Two U.S. senators last month sent a letter to the
Department of Homeland Security, which is home to the border protection agency,
urging that formal rules be implemented before the program is expanded.
“It will also ensure a full vetting of this potentially
sweeping program that could impact every American leaving the country by
airport,” said the letter from U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. and U.S. Sen. Mike
Lee, R-Utah.
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