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The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photo

• peteretep 8y ago
  > if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1% Is this worse than the current security measures in place while boarding?
  • Johnny555 8y ago
    Probably not since agents don't check ID at all, but if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent, I'd like to think that I'm getting something out of the deal.
    • peteretep 8y ago
      > if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent The same place where you literally already have to have your passport scanned, your face photographed, you're recorded in every area that isn't a restroom, where if you're not a US national your fingerprints taken, and they literally scan you beneath your clothes? You're worried about your privacy _there_?
      • Johnny555 8y ago
        A federal agency does that passport scanning and id check, I didn't expect them to share the same information with every airport agency in the country. I'm fine with the TSA scanning my passport, and the airport filming me. What I'm not so fine with is the airport also having my photo and identity, so now they aren't just filming me every place I walk in the airport, but they are also correlating that to my identity.
        • shostack 8y ago
          Just wait till it gets mapped to you when you enter the airport, and then they build a profile of your airport shopping behavior.
    • cm2187 8y ago
      It’s not like there aren’t CCTVs in airports. They have your face on many records that they keep much longer.
      • Johnny555 8y ago
        They have my picture, but they don't have my name. But when the airports get the passport photo database to implement this photo check-in, then they'll have my name too.
• paxy 8y ago
  Identity checks are handled by TSA, not airline employees, so this scan has nothing to do with security. They check your boarding pass to make sure you have paid for the flight you are getting on. Also "99% accuracy" can mean it has a 1% false-negative rate rather than false-positive, in which case they will just defer to scanning the boarding pass like normal.
  • ams6110 8y ago
    They also scan boarding passes at the gate to verify that all checked bags have a corresponding passenger on the aircraft.
    • cm2187 8y ago
      Plus they are required to know how many souls they have on board and who.
  • hueving 8y ago
    No, for international flights the airline additionally checks your passport at the gate (at least in the US).
    • toweringgoat 8y ago
      Correct. And they're essentially acting as outward immigration, since the airline's passport records are used to mark the unwanted/foreigners (like me) as departed. But the system is quite flaky, my arrival/departure record is missing a few departures - and I think that's where CBP want to improve things, possibly so they can more legitimately claim that someone overstayed when their records are incomplete. (And I guess also to spot passport swaps.)
      • guitarbill 8y ago
        It should come as no surprise the CBP will cooperate with other government departments, i.e. ICE. What would be interesting is finding out how they got funding for this rubbish. Judging from when they had these at SecTac in June, it just made everything much, much slower.
• T-hawk 8y ago
  99% accurate doesn't necessarily mean 1% wrong identification. It can merely mean the 1% is a "don't know" indeterminant result that doesn't meet some specified confidence level, for which you fall back to the paper scanning method.
• CaptainZapp 8y ago
  On most flights within the Schengen area your boarding pass is no more manually checked. That's unless you fly business or are a high value status customer. Instead you just scan your boarding pass / smart phone yourself. I can't imagine that this is in any way slower than a face scan.
  • tomcooks 8y ago
    Also a QR code would be a lot more precise IMO
  • cm2187 8y ago
    I thought airlines or airports were required to check your identity to endure that the checked in luggages fly along the passenger who checked them in, in case there is a bomb or something. Granted this rule is a bit absurd in a world where most terrorist attacks are suicide attacks.
    • CaptainZapp 8y ago
      It depends on the airport. Certainly when a borading pass, matched to a passenger who checked in luggage, is not used for boarding the luggage will be unloaded. Identity check really depends on the airport and airline. Sometimes your identity is checked when you enter the secure area, sometimes at the gate and sometimes not all. Even at airports that don't check identities airlines - notably budget airlines - may check id at the gate. It may also happen that id is (spot) checked upon exiting the plane, but this is very rare. That's only applicable for flights within the Schengen area. Passport checks upon leaving or entering the Schengen area are pretty strict. Essentially every piece of id is checked towards the SIS[1]. But within Schengen and depending on the airport there may be no checks at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Information_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Information_System
    • tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
      I believe this rule changed years ago when airports introduced 100% luggage screening.
  • 8y ago
• NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Self-scanning in supermarkets was supposedly all about speeding checkout as a benefit to the consumer. This is about speeding boarding - that's the marketing friendly benefit to be shouted about. In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases. The real benefit to both this, and supermarket self-scanning, is another low wage employee can be canned. This isn't a very marketing friendly message so it's no surprise that this isn't the message that publicised loudest.
  • eridius 8y ago
    The other benefit of self-checkout is you can fit perhaps 8 machines in the space that you used to use for 3 lanes, so even though an individual checkout might take longer, overall you can probably get higher throughput on the self-checkout.
  • Groxx 8y ago
    Per item? Sure. For small numbers of items, counting time spent waiting? Heck no, I regularly get through self-checkout much faster than people who get into a regular queue, in no small part because there's often a few times more self-checkout scanners than there are open checkouts. When you have a full cart or two, the speedier scanning at a traditional checkout pays off. But usually both are available, not just self checkout, so you're free to choose when that isn't the case.
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      Not round here. The big Tesco nearby has a single combined queue for all the 20 or so self-scan checkouts. They are rarely all in service. With a few items it is now always faster to go to an operator checkout unless you go in at 4am. The express lanes of "under 10 items" or "cash only" are a memory of a former, much faster time. There is often an employee aggressively marshalling people to the self-scan checkouts at every available opportunity and trying to pull them away from the staffed lines. In the local Pound shop they tried replacing all checkouts with self-scan, getting rid of all others. They had to reverse this a month or two later and put back half a dozen, now brand new, staff operated tills - ripping out a few weeks-old self-scanners to make space. They are again slower thanks to rarely having staff nearby to handle the steady stream of staff authorisations and errors, so there's a big delay every time someone wanders over from the back of the store to wave their bar code and immediately disappear again.
• dhimes 8y ago
  Definitely not a time-saving measure. The time limiting factor is the actual getting-on-the-plane-and-putting-your-carryon-away-and-getting-out-of-the-aisle part. Often I get my boarding pass scanned and go stand in line on the gangway. In fact a mathematical algorithm was developed for loading faster[1] but I'm not sure anybody tried that yet. [1] https://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html https://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html
• YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  >> The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing >> Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos I think what they mean is that they carried out laboratory tests where a test subject stood facing the system's camera and the system tried to match their face to a database of pictures of peoples' faces, then decided whether the subject's face matched one in its database. There is a lot that one can do to make this kind of testing give much better results than it should (e.g. use a small database, rather than the entire US passport photo database plus photos of visiting foreigners). This does not presuppose malice- a bit of sloppiness or choices dictated by budget restriction are plenty enough to "spike" the results. On the other hand, even assuming 100% accurate evaluation one can expect a machine vision system's accuracy to fall way down when it's deployed in the real world, where conditions can no longer be as strictly controlled as in the lab. So as a rule of thumb, we can probably assume that a 99% accuracy in the lab translates to ~75% accuracy in the wild.
  • solatic 8y ago
    > e.g. use a small database, rather than the entire US passport photo database plus photos of visiting foreigners Doing so would be wildly inefficient. You need your passport to check in for your flight. When boarding the plane, you don't need to check someone's face against the entire passport database, only against the passports which have been checked into the flight, which is particularly important in terminals with shared domestic/international departures where entry is possible without a passport and the passport can be transferred to somebody after check-in. But the main reason why it's anyway infeasible is because flights are rarely full of people of a single nationality; scanning peoples' faces against a wide-ranging passport photo database effectively means scanning their faces against some kind of global database of the faces of everybody from around the world. Assembling a database like that, apart from the ethical issues, is politically infeasible. Remember - this system doesn't advocate for people to not need their passports at all when traveling. They still need them - just not after check-in. The question is whether the system is more or less accurate than a human being at matching passport photos to faces, and based on what we know about racial bias, the answer to that is probably that facial recognition is more accurate by now.
• muse900 8y ago
  I agree that we just need to keep a secure level on flights, although I've come to a conclusion over the last few years. That conclusion is that either Terrorists are not smart enough or they just have an agenda that is being pushed by someone specifically on a specific target for whatever reason. I'll expand a bit. For the past 5 years I've been travelling every 2 weeks using an airplane. Thats mainly within Europe. I've been to airports within Europe, specifically Santorini Airport, Mykonos Airport, Chania Airport where I've seen things going on that really doesn't make sense, nor it makes sense to my on why terrorist groups wouldnt prefer those kind of airports for their attack. On Mykonos airport 2 years ago, Security check was handled by 2 young police officer in their very early 20's, no supervisor, no metal detectors no nothing. A wheelchair went ahead and they were trying to help the wheelchair to get front and they completely disregarded security. I wasn't searched or anything and I got boarded to a flight going to London. Someone could easily pass any kind of weapon in there. (The airport has since got renovated and prolly it goes with the European standards nowadays). Santorini Airport 4 years ago to London, again flight going to London, there were so many people waiting and there was only 1 police officer in his late 50's trying to do security checks for hundreds of people. You understand how that system can fail. Again I got no checks on me or anything. Bare in mind both airports I am speaking of had no way to check cabin luggage for anything suspicious, it had to be done by the police officer looking into the bag, and that only was done if he thought that you could be carrying something. I saw him performing it once. (Again this airport has been renovated prolly keeps the European standards now) Chania airport 1 year ago to Athens, they had around 5 security personel and 1 police officer. A friend of the police officer rocks up with a small hand bag, police officer silently asks him infront of me if he is carrying any firearms with him. He replies yes, gives him the handbag, passes through security and I saw his id he wasn't a police officer but a civilian, the police officer passes the bag behind the counters and proceeds giving it to him after the security check... (Nowadays I dont see police officers around the security but it did happen a year ago) Thats only 3 airports I've been on and I've seen how easy it is to pass anything in an airplane and 2 of those airplanes were headed to London which is one of the big city capitals and targets. And I am pretty sure there are other places around Europe and other countries that the same thing is happening security wise. And if a civilian like me without resources can see those massive security breaches in a few of the airports he's been to, I am pretty certain that big terrorist groups with massive fundings and people everywhere cause they do have people everywhere, know about those security breaches. It still remains a question to me on why they never used those entrances. P.S those 3 examples are from Greece, and well thats where I am from and thats where I use to travel a lot (back and forth to London) so thats why my examples are from here. Pretty sure other people have such examples to give.
• lost_snake 8y ago
  It's not about protecting anyone. No terrorist organization is going to re-attempt 9/11, because why would you? Repetitions of the Mumbai attacks (notably in Paris) will be the norm, along with mass violence at a low intensity as Muslim radicals simply migrate in huge numbers into Europe and North America.