> I’m not interested in why anarcho-fascists or tinfoil hat libertarians or Luddites think it’s a bad idea - I’d like to know why your average reasonable man would have a problem with this.
I think this is an overly adversarial view of people trying to take a long and systems based view of this, but even if we do focus on the immediate practicalities, there are a couple of obvious ones.
First, and foremost, I don't trust TSA to get it right. Facial recognition is one of many technologies that works well enough most of the time that it might be fine for non-critical infrastructure, but there are enough issues with it that at the scale of imposing it on all passengers we should anticipate a lot of negative impact. This can include both the possibility of bad actors being allowed to travel because they can find effective ways to defeat the system, and innocent people being negatively impacted through no fault of their own. Early on the system may be opt-in, and in the medium term there may be reasonable paths to opt out, but once the system is mandatory- or a significant default, people will be punished with a significantly degraded experience because the technology doesn't work well for them.
There's also the infosec angle. I don't trust TSA to get security right any more than I trust them to get facial recognition working right. We've already seen leaks of images from millimeter wave scanners. Although a photo of your face may not be as private as the images leaked from those scanners, there are a lot of potential negative outcomes from someone getting a hold of a corpus of facial recognition data, especially if it contains more than just a raw photo and includes information that could help someone to impersonate you.
I think this is an overly adversarial view of people trying to take a long and systems based view of this, but even if we do focus on the immediate practicalities, there are a couple of obvious ones.
First, and foremost, I don't trust TSA to get it right. Facial recognition is one of many technologies that works well enough most of the time that it might be fine for non-critical infrastructure, but there are enough issues with it that at the scale of imposing it on all passengers we should anticipate a lot of negative impact. This can include both the possibility of bad actors being allowed to travel because they can find effective ways to defeat the system, and innocent people being negatively impacted through no fault of their own. Early on the system may be opt-in, and in the medium term there may be reasonable paths to opt out, but once the system is mandatory- or a significant default, people will be punished with a significantly degraded experience because the technology doesn't work well for them.
There's also the infosec angle. I don't trust TSA to get security right any more than I trust them to get facial recognition working right. We've already seen leaks of images from millimeter wave scanners. Although a photo of your face may not be as private as the images leaked from those scanners, there are a lot of potential negative outcomes from someone getting a hold of a corpus of facial recognition data, especially if it contains more than just a raw photo and includes information that could help someone to impersonate you.