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by mienski 2609 days 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.
2 comments
yalogin 2609 days 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.

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seandougall 2609 days 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.

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jtd514 2609 days ago
JetBlue doesnt need to do this. Why would they take the risk? You are being a bit ridiculous.
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seandougall 2609 days 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.

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