The Tyranny of Convenience

“I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight. Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge,” MacKenzie Fegan tweeted last week. “Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to me? Did I consent to this?”

The quick answer? Yes and no.

Yes, facial recognition did replace boarding passes for international travelers in some U.S. airports recently, and — if the Trump administration has its way — it will be the default check-in method in many more airports by 2020. And no, Fegan did not overtly consent to this specific use of facial recognition. Nor did anyone else, presumably. In a subsequent tweet, JetBlue told Fegan that passengers can “opt out of this procedure,” suggesting that JetBlue considers consent to be implied by default.

If we take the airline’s word for it, JetBlue assumed that its passengers would find biometric check-in more convenient than the conventional method.

Part of the answer as to why JetBlue might have made that assumption — that people would actually want their faces to serve as a boarding pass, instead of a piece of paper or their smartphone — appears in a press release JetBlue linked to in its response thread with Fegan.

Back in November, when biometric boarding was introduced at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, JetBlue’s senior vice president of customer experience was quoted praising the technology as “a testament to the airline’s ongoing work to create a personal, helpful, and simple experience.” If we take the airline’s word for it, JetBlue assumed that its passengers would find biometric check-in more convenient than the conventional method.