biometrics in airline tickets touted as making 'the process quicker'
posted by:Dina Mashayekhi // 06:17 PM // July 07, 2005 // Surveillance and social sorting
nice of them to do this just to make things more convenient for us -- heck i'll give 'em my dna so i can wait in line 2 minutes less.
i just wonder -- how long will the line take to encode your ticket with fingerprint data...
Airline tests biometric tickets
BERLIN (AP) -- The German airline Lufthansa has started testing tickets encoded with passengers' thumbprint data in hopes of speeding up check-ins without compromising security.
The 14-day trial started Monday with Lufthansa employees trying out the system, spokesman Thomas Jachnow said. If all goes well, the airline wants to roll it out in 2006.
Though people will still be able to check in for flights using the "classic system," the voluntary use of biometric data would make the process quicker, Jachnow said.
Passengers would get tickets encoded with their thumbprint data, then check themselves in by placing their thumbs on a machine. Frequent fliers would have their thumbprint data encoded on their frequent flier cards instead of their tickets, Jachnow said.
The German government is also starting to make use of biometric data in travel documents and will start issuing passports embedded with facial data in November. A fingerprint will be added in March 2007.
From Canoe
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Comments
How do you view this technology in the setting of the recent bombings?
are you familiar with steve mann's decon drills? there is lots of food for thought from them in terms of developing systems and techniques of protecting victem rights in the setting of a catastrophic attack.
http://wearcam.org/tpw_decon_drill/
http://stefanospantagis.net/journal/
Posted by: stefanos at July 8, 2005 11:04 AM
Link one
Link two
Posted by: stefanos at July 8, 2005 11:06 AM
>>How do you view this technology in the setting of the recent bombings?
Definitely have to say any/all biometrics are far more scary to me than a random act of terrorism. I'd rather live in a society where a few people die every year from terrorism, than a society where people have no privacy/freedom.
While death from terrorism is horrible, keep it in perspective. Cancer will kill FAR more people than terrorism this year. However, the world's goverments aren't creating DNA databases to 'check for links to cancer' and spending billions to stop 'future cancer attacks'.
Posted by: Anonymous at July 14, 2005 01:04 PM
