Delta Airlines Introducing Facial Recognition For Travelers

Delta Airlines is announcing that beginning as soon as this summer, Minneapolis-St. Paul airport will have automated baggage kiosks for “priority customers” that will first scan a travelers passport, then their face in order to match identity to checked luggage. It is being promoted as a pilot program that Delta is seeking customer feedback for in the hope that it can be rolled out more widely in the future. This move is part and parcel of what is quickly becoming global in scope.

I reported back in January that Australia was seeking to become the first nation to implement biometric identification for all airports nationwide. And, as correctly noted by The Verge, other U.S. states and nations have begun their own programs with varying degrees of scale:

CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection – Ed.] began testing facial recognition systems at Dulles Airport in 2015, then expanded the tests to New York’s JFK Airport last year. Face-reading check-in kiosks will be appearing at Ottawa International Airport this spring, and British Airways is rolling out a similar system at London’s Heathrow Airport, comparing faces captured at security screenings with a separate capture at the boarding gate.

Source: The Verge