Facial recognition technology is taking over airports

When you’re planning on flying, there are a lot of factors that need to be taken care of. It’s never simple. Adding to the already hassled-environment is Trump’s Administration’s recent announcement that makes it mandatory for visa applications to provide their social media history among other details as well.

International airline JetBlue in an effort to simplify this procedure has announced a new plan that uses facial recognition technology instead of traditional boarding passes. The company is reportedly working with US Customs and Border Protection in flights between Boston’s Logan International Airport and Aruba’s Queen Beatrix International Airport. Thanks to this initiative, passengers won’t be required to enrol or pre-register to opt in. They simply need to step up to the camera at their gate during the boarding process for a quick scan. Following which, the scan will be compared with the computer’s database of passport photos. This technology will be used for all passengers.

"We hope to learn how we can further reduce friction points in the airport experience, with the boarding process being one of the hardest to solve," said JetBlue's executive vice president customer experience, Joanna Geraghty. "Self-boarding eliminates boarding pass scanning and manual passport checks. Just look into the camera and you're on your way."

This isn’t the first time such a technology has been incorporated. In the past, Delta airline added a strategy to the way it handles bag checking wherein travellers who wish to check bags will print tags at Delta kiosks before preceding over to machines that match them with their passport photos during identification. Moreover, America isn’t the only country where this process is being initiated. “The Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection announced a while back the intent to use facial recognition technology along with fingerprint scanners to identify passengers in Australian airports by 2020,” reported The Mashable.

While the new procedure is set to help save customers time and even free airline employees to work on other, more important issues; the concern that how accurate these systems can prove to be, still remains. The facial recognition technology does come along with several drawbacks. For instance, the system apparently can’t recognise all the faces with an equal amount of accuracy.