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I can bet that they have a copy of all photos on their servers. No company will be foolish enough to build a business/service that relies on another entity, muc

I can bet that they have a copy of all photos on their servers. No company will be foolish enough to build a business/service that relies on another entity, much so a government organization that is not known for building highly scalable services. This is a crucial part of their process and any delays will impact their bottom line. So they have all faces with them and so does every other company. Also, just the face is not enough, they need all the other identifying info associated with it. So they got everything. Also, the government organization is not foolish enough to build such a service they get to be blamed for. They gave/sold that data away. Just the face is of no use, the identifying information that goes along with it is also given. So at this point any company in the US can just query your entire info from your photo. Privacy is dead and it is provided as a service by the government. Wonderful. Question is can anyone get this data?

mienski 8y ago
While I’m totally onboard with the privacy concerns, this is ridiculous FUD to just assume that every company just took on the security and storage risk of holding that data. Find me an enterprise department/exec that would willingly take that on to support a trial. The corporate bogeyman is a great story but I think you’re being a little unrealistic here. These systems typically allow the picture to be sent in with a name, and the system returns a success or fail response.
- seandougall 8y ago
  I don’t disagree with your overarching point, but it can’t be quite that simple, if it works as advertised. In order for it to send a name with the photo, the passenger would have to scan some sort of documentation to provide their name, which would defeat the purpose of “your face is your boarding pass”. It seems more likely that the CBP system compares against passenger manifests of upcoming flights. Which isn’t necessarily more intrusive, but it is a bit less straightforward than a simple yes/no query.
- yalogin 8y ago
  I don’t think so. I am being completely reasonable and rational here. Let me ask this, what is special about JetBlue? If JetBlue doesn’t host the service on their data centers would they be willing to offer such a service? If a government agency can reasonably be expected to not play favorites and offer the service to anyone within reason, do you think they will be able to scale it up and offer the kind of SLAa expected by money making businesses? Why would an agency want to get in to that endeavor? Please, offer me alternative view points rather than calling my theory FUD.
  - seandougall 8y ago
    Presumably the airline could always fall back on traditional paper/mobile boarding passes if the system goes down. It’d mean a bit of a delay, but it’s not like the whole operation would grind to a halt. It’s true that we have no guarantee that the airlines won’t save our photos along with our ID information, but they _could_ already have been doing that for years. There just doesn’t seem to be that much reason why they would.
  - jtd514 8y ago
    JetBlue doesnt need to do this. Why would they take the risk? You are being a bit ridiculous.
unreal37 8y ago
They say that the photos are discarded after being compared by the government on government servers with the original. So you're saying, they're lying. Which might be true. But you'd need to prove that.
- markdown 8y ago
  > So you're saying, they're lying. Which might be true. But you'd need to prove that. I've read repeatedly on HN over the past couple of months (re: Boeing and Facebook) that these corporations are required to lie about the naughty things they do. The shareholders' interest must be protected at all cost.
  - thekyle 8y ago
    If a company is caught taking on additional risk that they explicitly said they weren't then that is a very good case for shareholders to sue.
jtd514 8y ago
This is foolish. It would be very dumb for a company to take the liability if they did not have to.
- codedokode 8y ago
  They can say that the photos were stored by mistake and were supposed to be deleted.
nickodell 8y ago
>This is a crucial part of their process and any delays will impact their bottom line. If the government servers go down, JetBlue can fall back to checking paper boarding passes.
ddalex 8y ago
Probably it's all stored in plain text on an unsecured S3 bucket.
forgottenpass 8y ago
>No company will be foolish enough to build a business/service that relies on another entity, It's an airline operating at an airport. That operation is already inseparably interwoven with number of other organizations - including the government - just to move a tube full of people from point A to B. >much so a government organization that is not known for building highly scalable services In that case, it's good for them that they have such a highly predictable load target. Airports have a fixed number of gates and a maximum number of planes ATC can smoothly get into the air in an hour. There's your upper bound. Flight plans and ticket sales set the normal band and refine the performance target. Load can be well understood, and they have lots of visibility into future demand changes. >This is a crucial part of their process It's a pilot program. As much as I doubt they'd let this system ever be a single point of failure under normal operation, an experimental system certainly has a fallback plan for boarding.

mienski 8y ago

While I’m totally onboard with the privacy concerns, this is ridiculous FUD to just assume that every company just took on the security and storage risk of holding that data. Find me an enterprise department/exec that would willingly take that on to support a trial. The corporate bogeyman is a great story but I think you’re being a little unrealistic here. These systems typically allow the picture to be sent in with a name, and the system returns a success or fail response.

seandougall 8y ago
I don’t disagree with your overarching point, but it can’t be quite that simple, if it works as advertised. In order for it to send a name with the photo, the passenger would have to scan some sort of documentation to provide their name, which would defeat the purpose of “your face is your boarding pass”. It seems more likely that the CBP system compares against passenger manifests of upcoming flights. Which isn’t necessarily more intrusive, but it is a bit less straightforward than a simple yes/no query.
yalogin 8y ago
I don’t think so. I am being completely reasonable and rational here. Let me ask this, what is special about JetBlue? If JetBlue doesn’t host the service on their data centers would they be willing to offer such a service? If a government agency can reasonably be expected to not play favorites and offer the service to anyone within reason, do you think they will be able to scale it up and offer the kind of SLAa expected by money making businesses? Why would an agency want to get in to that endeavor? Please, offer me alternative view points rather than calling my theory FUD.
- seandougall 8y ago
  Presumably the airline could always fall back on traditional paper/mobile boarding passes if the system goes down. It’d mean a bit of a delay, but it’s not like the whole operation would grind to a halt. It’s true that we have no guarantee that the airlines won’t save our photos along with our ID information, but they _could_ already have been doing that for years. There just doesn’t seem to be that much reason why they would.
- jtd514 8y ago
  JetBlue doesnt need to do this. Why would they take the risk? You are being a bit ridiculous.

unreal37 8y ago

They say that the photos are discarded after being compared by the government on government servers with the original. So you're saying, they're lying. Which might be true. But you'd need to prove that.

markdown 8y ago
> So you're saying, they're lying. Which might be true. But you'd need to prove that. I've read repeatedly on HN over the past couple of months (re: Boeing and Facebook) that these corporations are required to lie about the naughty things they do. The shareholders' interest must be protected at all cost.
- thekyle 8y ago
  If a company is caught taking on additional risk that they explicitly said they weren't then that is a very good case for shareholders to sue.

jtd514 8y ago

This is foolish. It would be very dumb for a company to take the liability if they did not have to.

codedokode 8y ago
They can say that the photos were stored by mistake and were supposed to be deleted.

nickodell 8y ago

>This is a crucial part of their process and any delays will impact their bottom line. If the government servers go down, JetBlue can fall back to checking paper boarding passes.

ddalex 8y ago

Probably it's all stored in plain text on an unsecured S3 bucket.

forgottenpass 8y ago

>No company will be foolish enough to build a business/service that relies on another entity, It's an airline operating at an airport. That operation is already inseparably interwoven with number of other organizations - including the government - just to move a tube full of people from point A to B. >much so a government organization that is not known for building highly scalable services In that case, it's good for them that they have such a highly predictable load target. Airports have a fixed number of gates and a maximum number of planes ATC can smoothly get into the air in an hour. There's your upper bound. Flight plans and ticket sales set the normal band and refine the performance target. Load can be well understood, and they have lots of visibility into future demand changes. >This is a crucial part of their process It's a pilot program. As much as I doubt they'd let this system ever be a single point of failure under normal operation, an experimental system certainly has a fallback plan for boarding.