Czech police forced to turn off facial recognition cameras at the Prague airport
edri.org
edri.org
In this case it seems like a legitimate use of facial recognition: catching criminals. The story is of interest to me because i've been through the airport many times. I guess they have a picture of me.
ot but in many European airports i've been to they have those clunky face scanning machines and after that proper passport controls. I've discovered that in some places i can skip them and get my passport stamped with no issues.
They do however use face recognition when you take a domestic flight from an international terminal. Then they take a photo of you just before security and compare that when you board. To me this seems like an overly complex solution to a problem that would normally by solved by having a domestic section of the terminal, but I’m sure they had their reasons.
God, a well functioning democractic society, the UK is not...
So what? What do you suppose that proves or justifies or excuses?
The ID served a valid purpose of controlling who had access to beer, yet did not track anyone's movements or habits or compile a profile on them or associate them with others into cohorts or allow anyone to presume to make any kinds of judgements or predictions about them.
The two things are not automatically and necessarily tied. It's a disingenuous lie to act like they are and use the one to justify or excuse the other.
Indulging in a little predicting myself, let me guess what comes next, "But showing ID for beer never prevented every single underage human from somehow obtaining beer." ? Wait it was unfair for me to assume that based on some data I just collected (your comment)?
This literally changes nothing.
Have you traveled outside the country? Please share with everyone on HN the exact date and times, the street address where you stayed and the phone number of someone who can corroborate.
Can you think of any reason that this information shouldn't be shared publicly? Maybe post your phone number and we'll chat about it.
It's a public space, and you must show ID to gain access to the secured area. Additionally, you are subjected to baggage and carry-on inspection, as well as body inspection and metal detection, etc. There are cameras everywhere, monitoring and recording everything.
Presumably this system was designed to recognize individuals that may be traveling under false-identities, and are known "bad guys" - otherwise the nation-state security apparatus would have known about the attempted air travel well in advance.
The ability to abuse this system may be real, but it seems much more likely your rights would be violated well before you reached any facial recognition systems.
Many former Warsaw Pact citizens have lived under a surveillance state with a dossier on every citizen, and didn't find it particularly great.
Well, yeah, all of that presents a privacy problem. Automation is taking it a step further, but if I had my way boarding a plane would be like boarding a train or bus. I could concede a fast-moving checkpoint that does some best-effort scanning for firearms and blades or whatever as people walk through a gate, provided the data is verifiably shredded as soon as scanning is complete. This safety paranoia is not borne of genuine danger. People walk into more crowded and critical areas than planes with firearms all the time in the US. The only thing stopping frequent mass-casualty deaths is that most people don't want to kill a ton of other people indiscriminately, not the TSA.
Securing the cockpit doors on planes is a good idea though.
Unless your pilot is having a particularly bad day.
I did recently see a video of a pilot that proposed to his girlfriend as she boarded his plane.
I bet all the passengers were thinking "Please, please say 'yes'", and were overly-happy both for the newly-engaged couple, and more for themselves that she did.
No, I don't have an answer to the door problem.
The hijackings didn’t make people go crazy.
Unticketed passengers even could walk up to the gate.
Identification wasn’t even checked while boarding — just a ticket was required.
How far we’ve fallen…
That said you're certainly not getting near any gates without a ticket in Europe these days either.
These systems are built and controlled entirely by third party private corporations who are only technically held to any kind of standards on privacy or security. In the absolute worst possible case, they receive a symbolic fine for breaking any privacy or data security laws.
Whether or not you trust "the government" is almost irrelevant. Do you trust whatever corporate entitiy has exclusive control over these systems? Do you even know who that is?
But seriously I don't think you can fly direct from the US to Prague. You're gonna get face-scanned in Heathrow or some other transit airport.
But I am once again impressed with the Czechs. They get it.
Quite staggering considering this is HN.
If you're upset by security vs privacy at airports - don't Google how cell phones and credit cards work...
..and for the love of sanity - don't ask yourself how often you did not bring a phone and only used cash during a trip abroad.
Good luck. Make sure you take your meds.
..if by any chance you DO want to educate yourself - the reality is - removal of airport security only benefits criminals and mad people looking to hurt you.
Privacy battles are fought elsewhere.
And each is usually hard to convince otherwise, and many judge the opposit group.
Me I dont care, I just want cheaper bottles of water in airport.
Like all powerful tools it has to be used responsibly.
My point is merely that we are all tracked by other means that affect our life in much deeper and profound ways.
..like for example purchase history, cell phone location, internet use etc bought and sold by private corporations, with little to no oversight.
If you want privacy, close your bank account, throw away your phone, use cash, don't own property, quit your day job etc etc
Worrying about cameras is naive at best.
I went through 8 security gates, and no one ever stopped or questioned me about the water. And when I found it at my destination, I threw it out.
So as airports upgrade those rules may finally be getting obsoleted.
They did offer to ship the bottle to us at our expense, but the shipping fee was over a hundred pounds and it was cheaper to buy a much larger bottle of the same stuff from an importer.
I hope some day we can dispense with the security theater.
She ended up just having a 70 cL bottle shipped to us and we wrote off the one stolen at Heathrow.