Written All Over Your Face

Great news! No more boarding passes. According to the Evening Standard, “boarding passes and traditional check-ins are set to be abolished as part of the most significant overhaul of the aviation industry in half a century.” You will download a “journey pass” when you book your flight, and it takes care of checking in. When you get to the airport, the camera at the boarding gate will peruse your mug, and ding! Exeunt to yonder, subcategories blue, wild.

I’ve experienced facial recognition in European entry points. A machine dispassionately scans your face and gives you the green light or the red. You worry that heaven might have the same impersonal procedure. Oh, sure, when the world population was low, you could get by with one guy at the Pearly Gates with a big book and a quill. The personal touch. Now it’s probably like passport control in Cancún on a Sunday afternoon in February.

We’re already doing facial-recognition boarding in the U.S., sometimes. It’s very modern and high-tech. I hate it. Excuse me, but . . . how do you know my face? Where is my face stored, exactly? I assume it’s a collection of ones and zeroes on a hard drive in some vast server farm in Virginia. I assume the file has a name, probably a numerical string, and I’ll never know what it is. This is the strange thing about the modern world: on one hand, there’s a file on me that is literally the Permanent Record we worried about in grade school, the file that would make it impossible for you to get into college or get a good job because you lit a smoke bomb in the girls’ restroom in 1972. On the other hand, my Social Security files are probably written on paper and stored in a cardboard box on the ninth level of a shelf in a salt cave in Pennsylvania, and there’s one guy whose job it was to retrieve the files for people born on my date. And he was fired by DOGE.

The facial-recognition program has to account for the aging process, right? It would go like this: “Hmm. Looks like this guy, but the ears are slightly larger, and the hair is slightly thinner. It also appears as if he has colored his hair and bought new glasses. Well, the other 476 facial data points match up, and since we tracked his phone from his house to the airport, and tied the credit card he used at the coffee shop to his account, and verified his Instagram post yesterday about suitcase-packing ‘hacks’ — gosh, socks packed into shoes, guy’s a seasoned globetrotter — and since the trash can biometric readers analyzed the touch DNA from the sleeve around the coffee cup (the idiots still think that’s to protect them from the heat of the beverage), it’s him.”

The move to total facial recognition will probably be seen by some as another sign of something Very Bad, like the Real ID requirement to board a plane. Some people are alarmed by the new requirement — What is this, an internal passport? Your papers, mein Herr? It was signed into law about 20 years ago, so it’s not as if people haven’t had time to prepare. It’s like watching a car slowly roll toward you for a week, then yelping when it runs over your foot. Besides, don’t we want ironclad, spoof-proof ID to crack down on illegals and voter fraud? Yes, but not if it means I have to find my birth certificate.

Also, the “journey pass” project is the work of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, a U.N. body, and Americans are prickly about submitting to any body that does not spell “organization” with a “z.”

Anyway. I will not miss boarding passes. Like all good moderns, I use my phone for these things, but I also print it out. I could lose my phone at the airport, AND THEN WHAT? The battery on my phone could die, AND THEN WHAT? This happened once. My phone went wonky as I was in line, and I had to dig out the paper backup. Everyone else was beeping and going, and I felt like that lady in the grocery store line who waits until the bill is toted up and then begins spelunking in her enormous purse for a checkbook.

So sure, use my face. But if I pass the checkpoint while wearing a Groucho Marx mustache and glasses, I have some questions.