The Transportation Security Administration plans to conduct facial recognition tests at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport, another in a series of such tests.
The test at McCarran will last 30 days, according to a TSA official quoted by Axios. TSA Precheck passengers will volunteer for the test, which will be done through a Credential Authentication Technology device with a camera. Passengers' live facial images will be captured and compared to their IDs.
The collected data will be deleted after 180 days. Also, a TSA agent will manually verify a passenger’s identity with travel documents regardless of the test results.
According to its website, the TSA began testing biometrics technologies to verify identities in 2015. Tests have been conducted at New York’s JFK International, and Los Angeles International starting at JFK in 2017, while a Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International test is underway.
There are privacy concerns from the ACLU and others. The ACLU is opposed to the TSA facial recognition checkpoints being used for general law enforcement by the FBI for surveillance, for instance.
The concerns over privacy with facial recognition have led San Francisco and Berkeley, California, and Somerville, Mass., to enact bans on the use of facial recognition but initiatives in Congress affecting all 50 states haven’t gained any traction.