A strange thing happened at U.S. airports today. Travelers were asked to undergo facial scans during security checks before boarding their flights. But here’s the funny part; you can actually say no to this, and most people don’t even realize it. Experts, however, are warning that you should say no.
Since 2020, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) has been using this facial matching technology at some of the airports of the country to check if the traveler matches with the ID they are carrying .
As per the TSA, this process is optional for the domestic flyers, however some of the foreign nationals might be required to go through it in case there’s an international travel.
If you’re flying, say no to the facial recognition scans when they check your ticket prior to passing through the TSA checkpoint.
They won’t tell you that you have the option, but you do. Make sure not to stand in front of the camera.
Rights: Use them or lose them. pic.twitter.com/A6qlylMY6e
— Jordan Bush (@jmbushwrites) April 23, 2025
As per some of the experts, there are some signs that should alert the travelers regarding why they should avoid it but these signs can sometimes be very hard to figure out.
Lawyer Travis LeBlanc, a former member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, explains the advantage of opting out: “The benefit to declining is you don’t have to submit your picture to the government, for the government to scan it and store it under their rules.”
However, according to the TSA, pictures of the travelers are not stores when the match goes all right, however, these are excluded from limited testing environments, which certainly raises concerns. The roadmap of the TSA in 2022 states that there could be an expanding future role for biometrics “to validate and verify an identity and vetting status in real-time.”
The administration has clearly stated to HuffPost that “a real-time picture simply means that an image is taken at the kiosk and that ‘live’ photograph is matched against the image on the identification credential.”
A privacy and data policy fellow, at Stanford’s Human -Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute, Jennifer King reflected on the risks – “The TSA’s public communications are a little vague about what they were doing with the data.” She added that skepticism about government data handling makes her always refuse scans.
“I’m sure that the dream of enforcement agencies would be to be able to track people in real-time based on something like facial recognition,” King said.
While the TSA maintains on not collecting any sort of biometrics for surveillance, the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) also makes people undergo facial scans and stores the photos of the citizens of the United States for up to 12 hours, with even less certainty for non-citizens.
Concerns significantly grew concerning the fact that Trump‘s administration fired Democratic members the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in 2020. LeBlanc, who was among them, is now suing to be reinstated, as he called the firings illegal.
“The public has lost the watchdog that would be there to promote transparency as well as make recommendations on changes to the system that would better balance privacy and civil liberties,” LeBlanc said.
