In what advocates see as a victory for quicker airport processing time and skeptics see as another big invasion of privacy, Orlando International will become the first U.S. airport to scan faces of all departing and arriving passengers.
The images, taken with devices like the one above, will be fed through a Department of Homeland Security database to match passengers with names and documents, or to send them for manual clearance and possible exclusion. It’s an extension of a test program that started with cameras at 13 airports to scan passengers leaving and entering the country.
The scanning process is said to take less than two seconds and to have a 99% match rate, although some have pointed out that rates like that may not be sustainable when applied to hundreds of thousands of travelers a day.
Officially, U.S. citizens can choose to opt out of the facial scans, but Customs and Border Protection officials have not been notifying passengers of that, and it is unclear what will happen if one opts out—a quick manual paper check, or a long drawn-out delay.
