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Comment by rosser | Hacker News Reader

How do you imagine they aren't scanning your passport and driver's license photos, which you also need to fly/drive, and are also "100% verified" — because they are people's IDs — already anyway?

EDIT: Re: the "quality" of those photos: Because "they" already have the original image that was printed on your license or passport. Images really don't need to be that big or high quality to identifiably determine your facial features.

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This is Delta which do not have a copy or scan of your passport - just your textual info..., different to customs which do have this.

Also note that quality of Delta's photo booth will be much better than a copy of your passport.

This system was designed by CBP, not Delta. So yes, it has access to the passport database. (See my other post here for details.)

>How do you imagine they aren't scanning your passport and driver's license photos, which you also need to fly/drive, and are also "100% verified" — because they are people's IDs — already anyway?

DL photos are an extremely specific specification (no smiling, headgear etc) and only 1 angle. Delta could gather a much richer data set with these cameras.

How are they scanning my driver's license photo when they aren't scanning it a machine at all, and even if they did, the photo is not encoded to be digitally read, so they'd just get a relatively low quality image scan.

Your drivers license photo is already in a government database when it’s taken at the DMV.

I would argue that the photo on passports and licence cards, is too small and typically covered with a reflective security logo, to be good enough to extract useful point data for facial recognition.

Passport photos as well. Unless they're digitally encoded such that they can be extracted, they're usually quite bad due to watermark.

I'm not talking about scanning your passport when you hand it to the customs agent.

I'm talking about scanning the photo you gave them to make your passport with.

Why, for example, do you think they've started rejecting passport photos where you're wearing glasses, even if you otherwise wear them all of the time?

a. 2D photos are not as valuable b. They might not be allowed to. This face-scanning 'service' is an agreement between you and Delta, not the government and you.

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