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Don’t Fly Delta – Facial Recognition for Baggage Claim

May 16, 2017

I have never been a big fan of Delta Airlines, but then again, I don't live in Atlanta. Delta has announced that it will be testing four self-serve bag drop machines at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport that use facial recognition to validate a traveler's identity. The system will compare your passport picture with a scan of your face through identification verification according to the press release. It's bad enough that we have NO idea what happens to any of the biometric data we program into our devices. Do you really know that your fingerprint data doesn't get sent to Apple when you configure TouchID? Are you sure that Samsung isn't collecting your facial recognition image from your shiny new Galaxy S8?

In these days of daily data breaches and government surveillance, I'm not so sure I would trust any sort of authentication system that I don't TOTALLY control. Let's go back to the paper and smoke signal days since it appears to be a lot more private than passwords or biometric storage these days. For now, I'll stick with a paper baggage claim check. Your luggage will still get lost whether you take a selfie or not.

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