Soon Airports Might Use Automatic Facial Recognition Rather Than Human Agents To Recognize You

March 17, 2017 in Daily Bulletin

Automated facial recognition is used to tag our social media posts. It could soon make everyday life for international travelers easier, wrote The Economist:

  • Currently travelers can be held up in queues waiting to show their passports in five spots: check-in, security, outbound immigration, boarding, and inbound immigration.
  • Japan is looking to use facial recognition technology to automatically waive people through in its airports by the time it hosts The Olympics in 2020.
  • After France introduced new security measures due to terrorist attacks, airport queues doubled. The country is looking for ways to ease the congestion as well.
  • There’s still some ways to go. In 2012 Japan found that the technology failed to identify passengers correctly almost 20% of the time. Though algorithms has made massive strides since then.
  • The bigger challenge could be passengers objecting on privacy grounds. But that hasn’t stopped other security measures.

Read more on The Economist.