I assumed that every airport does it as a matter of policy. A border guard in the UK told me the reason they don't bother checking your passport when you leave is because they check your face on camera.
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.
Border guard was wrong. UK used passenger records from transport companies to determine when someone left the country, not face recognition.
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.
Last time I came into the USA from Europe they never checked my passport. They know who is on each arriving flight and match faces to passport records.
It's not just the government. Generally I think knowledge is very important, but as with any important value it butts up against other rights and values. In this case, the individual right to privacy ought to win out against a company or government's or neighbor's right to knowledge. Privacy, like speech, is one of those critically important rights that when violated en masse leads to catastrophic harm; in privacy's case that's through chilling effects, enabling more effective targeted enforcement of laws, and effective targeted propaganda campaigns. A lack of privacy reinforces and exaggerates any existing power structures and imbalances. For an authoritarian, this is fantastic. If you believe in democracy or egalitarianism it should be terrifying.
Is being in an airport actually considered private?
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.
> 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
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.
>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.
Eh, vetting pilots rigorously seems like it would 99% solve this. That and having more than one pilot in the cockpit makes rogue situations vanishingly unlikely, and that's the best you can do in any safety situation.
Generally we also don't trust the technology, not just the government. Unless you're up for being detained just because you look quite like some wanted person. Given enough samples, there is some guaranteed overlap.
Also technology provider is important. I doubt that government is able to self host face recognition. So the most common implementation would be microsoft (or any big corp good at lobbying in this part of the world) owning technology and data to preserve their vendor lock in. So there is high probability that those data will be used for other purposes (you can easily imagine standard corporate excuses if someone finds out).
"The government" did not implement, build, install, nor do they control or understand, these systems.
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?
Please post the full street address of your home, your office, your favorite grocery store, and your top ten gas stations.
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.
In the 70's, way before any internet databases and real-time data aggregation & automated analysis, you had to show ID to buy beer.
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)?
When you go through airport security, they scan your license. They're already doing everything people in this thread fear... stopping facial recognition doesn't change a thing expect let people with false identities through. It literally changes nothing... They already are keeping tabs on who you are, where you are coming from, and where you're going. Cohort analysis is already done via group ticket buys, and camera monitoring.
and who would verify that the system had not been modified and is being used in accordance with the law? pinky promise is not enough.
police forces in most (EU but not only) countries had proven multiple times that they think the law does not apply to them. they will always abuse such systems.
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.
great example, there are like 50% of people that share yours point of view on the subject (cameras not bad), and another 50% who have the strict opposit opinion (cameras not good).
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.
It's interesting how we can all have such opposit judgments while sharing roughly the same education/experiences, and that it usually falls into a 50/50 share.
I think an automated system to identify criminals in the most likely 'points of exit' is quite remarkable.
I know that throughout history government have not really been so gentle, but that's an anoher topic -we get the governments we deserve.
On the other hand, it would be nice to have something in return, like no more check-ins or something, and for the love of all that is love, maybe lessen this silly security check - take off my shoes? check my bag with a $50000 mass spectrometer to see if if there is powder? have any of these machine ever detected something anywhere in the world? How about less hypocrisy and tell us about that super elastic relation between 'time spent' and '$ spent" is?
I disgressed, but that's what annoys me, that a place where people are arbitrarly prohibited from bringing water, has criminally-inflated prices for a bottle of water -even if I'v been blessed so that I have them for free in the lounge.
That's what I think is a problem. Not cameras.
I travelled from Australia to Malaysia to Canada (with a stopover in Dubai), and all the time I had 2 1/2 bottles of water (probably 1.5 litres) in my carry-on bag that I had forgotten. Something about a 46-hour journey, perhaps.
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.
Can't happen soon enough. My wife tried to bring home a nice little bottle of scotch from Edinburgh and security confiscated because they could not convince themselves that 10 dL <= 100 mL. And further, that since the bottle capacity was cast into the glass and not printed on the paper label, it was possible that the actual content was greater than 100 mL. When my wife tried to question the logic of that reasoning, the lead security guy more or less threatened to fuck over our entire trip home by detaining us for a while.
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.
Yeah, I don't do metric by default, so I sometimes mixup the exact conversions, especially from memory. It was certainly cL, not dL. It was a bottle of this, which is not special, but a novelty souvenir my wife wanted to bring home: https://stagsbreath.co.uk/products/stags-breath-liqueur-10cl
She ended up just having a 70 cL bottle shipped to us and we wrote off the one stolen at Heathrow.
And at the same time, somewhere else https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780228
I assumed that every airport does it as a matter of policy. A border guard in the UK told me the reason they don't bother checking your passport when you leave is because they check your face on camera.
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.
Border guard was wrong. UK used passenger records from transport companies to determine when someone left the country, not face recognition.
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.
And this week it's lead to people's child benefits being stopped because they were deemed to have left the country and not returned, because their names were on passenger manifests: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/31/woman-flight...
God, a well functioning democractic society, the UK is not...
Last time I came into the USA from Europe they never checked my passport. They know who is on each arriving flight and match faces to passport records.
I thought that’s Global Entry which requires going through an in person interview process and paying an application fee (if I remember correctly)?
I just have a normal US passport.
this is great news and I wonder if and how this has impact on other European deployments
We're preferring ignorance to knowledge here because we don't trust the government. Which is weird.
It's not just the government. Generally I think knowledge is very important, but as with any important value it butts up against other rights and values. In this case, the individual right to privacy ought to win out against a company or government's or neighbor's right to knowledge. Privacy, like speech, is one of those critically important rights that when violated en masse leads to catastrophic harm; in privacy's case that's through chilling effects, enabling more effective targeted enforcement of laws, and effective targeted propaganda campaigns. A lack of privacy reinforces and exaggerates any existing power structures and imbalances. For an authoritarian, this is fantastic. If you believe in democracy or egalitarianism it should be terrifying.
Is being in an airport actually considered private?
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.
It's not the airport specifically, it's the use of automated facial recognition at all.
Many former Warsaw Pact citizens have lived under a surveillance state with a dossier on every citizen, and didn't find it particularly great.
Yet, most do not care about privacy and willing to use devices with spying software every day. Cars, smartphones, IoT...
XKeyscore
> 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
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.
Ironically what you describe was air travel in the 1980s-1990s, despite several high profile airline hijackings.
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…
Identification often isn't ever checked when flying within Europe _today_. They just check your ticket.
That said you're certainly not getting near any gates without a ticket in Europe these days either.
>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.
Eh, vetting pilots rigorously seems like it would 99% solve this. That and having more than one pilot in the cockpit makes rogue situations vanishingly unlikely, and that's the best you can do in any safety situation.
Generally we also don't trust the technology, not just the government. Unless you're up for being detained just because you look quite like some wanted person. Given enough samples, there is some guaranteed overlap.
Also technology provider is important. I doubt that government is able to self host face recognition. So the most common implementation would be microsoft (or any big corp good at lobbying in this part of the world) owning technology and data to preserve their vendor lock in. So there is high probability that those data will be used for other purposes (you can easily imagine standard corporate excuses if someone finds out).
If you don't trust the source how can you call what you received "knowledge?" Why is that weird?
Turnout during elections one month ago was about 68%. It doesn't look like Czechs don't trust a government.
"The government" did not implement, build, install, nor do they control or understand, these systems.
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?
No, we're preferring privacy to pervasive surveillance.
Prefering government ignorance is the same as privacy.
Privacy would mean being able to fly anywhere without showing ID - which is not reality.
Please post the full street address of your home, your office, your favorite grocery store, and your top ten gas stations.
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.
You probably use devices and tools that collect those data quite precisely. Banks, mobile career, cars...
We're taking about an airport... They know everything you just listed, and likely more. What an absolutely absurd argument.
In the 70's, way before any internet databases and real-time data aggregation & automated analysis, you had to show ID to buy beer.
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)?
When you go through airport security, they scan your license. They're already doing everything people in this thread fear... stopping facial recognition doesn't change a thing expect let people with false identities through. It literally changes nothing... They already are keeping tabs on who you are, where you are coming from, and where you're going. Cohort analysis is already done via group ticket buys, and camera monitoring.
This literally changes nothing.
I already stole your left shoe, so, might as well just make it legal to steal right shoes.
Sure to result in a surge of ticket sales as clandestine intelligence operatives pivot to Czechia as their flight hub of choice. /s
Nah, they still have Vienna.
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.
Delta airlines flies direct from JFK to PRG
[flagged]
and who would verify that the system had not been modified and is being used in accordance with the law? pinky promise is not enough.
police forces in most (EU but not only) countries had proven multiple times that they think the law does not apply to them. they will always abuse such systems.
This account posts AI slop, please flag it.
So much ignorance in this thread.
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.
great example, there are like 50% of people that share yours point of view on the subject (cameras not bad), and another 50% who have the strict opposit opinion (cameras not good).
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.
It's not cameras not good, it's face recognition not good. Because face recognition not good.
Face rec can be problematic if used with bad imagery and without proper oversight - agree.
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.
Cameras are mostly a threat to people that have to use burner phones and crypto at work.
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.
It's interesting how we can all have such opposit judgments while sharing roughly the same education/experiences, and that it usually falls into a 50/50 share. I think an automated system to identify criminals in the most likely 'points of exit' is quite remarkable. I know that throughout history government have not really been so gentle, but that's an anoher topic -we get the governments we deserve. On the other hand, it would be nice to have something in return, like no more check-ins or something, and for the love of all that is love, maybe lessen this silly security check - take off my shoes? check my bag with a $50000 mass spectrometer to see if if there is powder? have any of these machine ever detected something anywhere in the world? How about less hypocrisy and tell us about that super elastic relation between 'time spent' and '$ spent" is? I disgressed, but that's what annoys me, that a place where people are arbitrarly prohibited from bringing water, has criminally-inflated prices for a bottle of water -even if I'v been blessed so that I have them for free in the lounge. That's what I think is a problem. Not cameras.
I travelled from Australia to Malaysia to Canada (with a stopover in Dubai), and all the time I had 2 1/2 bottles of water (probably 1.5 litres) in my carry-on bag that I had forgotten. Something about a 46-hour journey, perhaps.
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.
Airports in UK have started lifting the fluid limits, the new X-ray machines are much better at determining the contents.
So as airports upgrade those rules may finally be getting obsoleted.
Can't happen soon enough. My wife tried to bring home a nice little bottle of scotch from Edinburgh and security confiscated because they could not convince themselves that 10 dL <= 100 mL. And further, that since the bottle capacity was cast into the glass and not printed on the paper label, it was possible that the actual content was greater than 100 mL. When my wife tried to question the logic of that reasoning, the lead security guy more or less threatened to fuck over our entire trip home by detaining us for a while.
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.
Hey man. 10dL = 1L
Yeah, I don't do metric by default, so I sometimes mixup the exact conversions, especially from memory. It was certainly cL, not dL. It was a bottle of this, which is not special, but a novelty souvenir my wife wanted to bring home: https://stagsbreath.co.uk/products/stags-breath-liqueur-10cl
She ended up just having a 70 cL bottle shipped to us and we wrote off the one stolen at Heathrow.
Plot twist: it was 10 deka-liters! (;->
That is good news!
Glad to see so many airports focusing on real threats instead of security theatre!
Weren't you thirsty, mate?