I'm always rejected at airport e-gates– so the Office suggested changing my name | Hacker News Reader

I'm always rejected at airport e-gates– so the Office suggested changing my name

telegraph.co.uk

20 pointsredbell20 comments

My wife has a problem at airports related to her name. When we married, she changed her name from Ann Betty Smith to Ann Smith Jones. That is, first name Ann, middle name Smith, last name Jones. Some federal agency or another entered her name into their database as first name Ann, no middle name, last name “Smith Jones”.

Now her drivers license is “Ann” “Smith” “Jones”, but we signed up with TSA Precheck and it expects her name to be “Ann” “Smith Jones”. Every time we travel, someone at the airport has to reconcile it.

We’re currently in the middle of spending $600 to legally change her name from Ann Smith Jones to Ann Smith Jones. That’s what the ad we had to run in the newspaper says.

Whenever someone says there's a glorious technological future and we're living in it, I read an anecdote like this one. The robots won't be using us as slaves, they'll be confused by the traffic-calming speed-bump that the apathetic underpaid offshore programmer didn't factor in.

I hope "Smith" was "Morgan" and "Jones" was "Stanley", just for the irony.

Yeah, the future is more likely to be a variant of ‘Brazil’ than anything else.

Also a bunch of watch lists use soundex algorithms and fuzzy matches and put you into all sorts of tarpits/extra screenings based on them.

If the name is actually ‘smith jones’ (or ‘Mohammed’, or ‘Chan’) your odds of getting whacked by one of them goes way up. Since what are the odds one of the hundreds of millions of people with a similar name misbehaved enough to get on one of those?

If the other Torgel McForkelsen gets one more DUI in this state and it causes me to get pulled over again, I'm gonna lose my mind.

Edit: More seriously, TSA has the idea of a "redress number". If you get flagged because your name buddy did something shady, you can get your own ID number that says "no, I'm a different John Smith than the one you're looking for". See https://www.dhs.gov/redress-control-numbers for more.

Good news, if you get charged and change your name they won't find you later!

My favorite is when someone gets arrested without ID and uses the name/info of someone they know but don’t like. Bonus points if they look somewhat similar at first glance.

That can be really fun to untangle.

[https://www.wbir.com/article/news/crime/tennessee-woman-stea...]

There is, afaik, exactly one other American with my first and last name. Fortunately, we're both reasonably upstanding citizens, so the scenario you mention has not come up.

Ah hell. My new passport might have my middle name as part of my last name

I am so sorry if that's the case. It's a recurring pain in the ass.

Step 1. Build an algorithm/AI to do what we want it to.

Step 2. It sometimes doesn't do what we wanted it to do.

Step 3. Humans are forced to changed their behaviors to suit the algorithm/AI

We work for the machines.

It's been a number of years since I re-entered the US from abroad, last time was before facial recognition. In my passport photo I think I look quite different from my current appearance (I have a heavy, fairly long beard now, which I started during the pandemic). But I sailed right through, didn't even have to show my passport at all.

I always got a kick out of those "e gates" the lines were always way longer and slower to move than going through the old fashioned boarder agent.

As someone that came through London Heathrow this morning - most of the time it's because half of the gates are switched off, seemingly for no reason as far as I can tell. Combine that with the fact that US, EU and UK passports can all use these in the UK, I'm sure if i went to the "other countries" line I'd probably get through faster

In the UK the e-gates are not automated. Your picture goes a few meters to a staffed desk who operates I think 8 gates.

It's an efficiency measure not an automation and as such is subject to the usual staffing problems.

Interesting - I did try to find more information about how these work, since I apparently did not understand how they function - but everything I could find mentions "facial recognition algorithm" as the mechanism for determining a person-passport match.

Examples - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPassport_gates

https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/student/international/news...

Ha - so akin to a Discworld camera! Pratchett would be laughing...

https://archive.is/WOhu8

I thought date of birth was used to disambiguate?

I’ve the same issue, been told point blank there’s nothing I can do about it because it relates to an issue “not about me” and will never be able to use the egates. It’s a complete shit show.

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