Tired of long airport lines? For biometric screening company Clear, frustration is a sales pitch

guest · Jul 6, 2018

Tired of long airport lines? For biometric screening company Clear, frustration is a sales pitch
July 4, 2018
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/tired...eening-company-clear-frustration-sales-pitch/

What’s Clear? It’s kind of like TSA PreCheck or Global Entry. Passengers sign up with these services before flying and trade some personal information for a chance at shorter security lines when they get to the airport.

It lets fliers use their fingerprints (or their eyes) instead of their IDs when entering security checkpoints. [...] For consumers, the main benefit is the chance to skip ahead to the physical screening portion of security checkpoints.

Other TSA efforts to stem the problem have seen mixed results. The TSA PreCheck program, which costs $75 for five years, turned out to be too popular with fliers, who now sometimes face long wait lines at airport security, anyway.
Clear says it’s just trying to help. TSA’s failure creates a market opportunity.

[...] it would be worth asking yourself: Do I trust this company long-term with my biometric information?
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mirimir · Jul 7, 2018

I'd prefer a system that locally (say, in a wearable device) calculated a hash of biometric information. So authentication would be based on the hash, not the actual biometric information. The device could easily be tested, to make sure that it hadn't been modified to impersonate someone else.

guest · Mar 17, 2019

A massive biometric breach is only a matter of time
March 16, 2019
https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/16/a-massive-biometric-breach-is-only-a-matter-of-time/

The reason CLEAR is able to process people so much faster is that they, like Global Entry, use biometric (retina and fingerprint) to identify people.

Now, when I signed up for the service, I acknowledged that I was signing away some privacy in favor of convenience. A trade-off we are increasingly making as a society.
But when I saw the number of people who had made the same decision, I realized that the databases for both CLEAR and Global Entry were becoming a biometric Equifax.

As these two biometric databases become more popular, they will become a bigger target for hackers. There’s no question there’s a black market for individual biometric data.
Any security expert will tell you a hack is not a question of “if,” just a question of “when.”
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guest · Jul 29, 2019

United Airlines offers easier biometric clearance for frequent flyers
The Clear deal is faster, but are you willing to share biometric info?
July 29, 2019
https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/29/united-airlines-clear-biometric-clearance/

The airline has forged a deal with Clear that will bring speedy facial recognition and fingerprint scanning to its frequent flyers, helping them skip the usual document checks.
Many passengers will get discounts on Clear as well, although the amount depends on just how devoted you are.

MileagePlus members can get Clear for $119 per year -- not trivial, but a significant deal over the usual $179. Most United credit card holders, as well as Premium Silver, Gold and Platinum members, will pay $109.
Jetsetters with a Global Services or Premier 1K membership, meanwhile, will have access for free.

United can process its passengers more efficiently, for that matter, with shorter lines and fewer flights behind schedule.
While Clear and United stress that the technology is "secure and seamless," it's still the case that you're trusting your sensitive biometric info to a third party.
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Tired of long airport lines? For biometric screening company Clear, frustration is a sales pitch

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