Florida’s busiest airport will be the first in the country to require a face scan of passengers on all arriving and departing international flights. Officials there say all passengers, including U.S. citizens, will be scanned. Orlando International Airport’s expected policy worries some privacy advocates. They say there are no rules in place for dealing with the information taken from the scans. Also, there is no system for assisting a passenger who is wrongly prevented from getting on an airplane.

Airports in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Washington already use face scans for some departing international flights. However, they do not scan all international travelers like the airport in Orlando plans to do.

The image from the face scan is compared to a Department of Homeland Security biometric database. The department has images of people to confirm travelers’ identities.

Harrison Rudolph is with the Center on Privacy & Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center. He said U.S. citizens at these airports can refuse to be scanned. But the agency does not seem to be letting people know they can refuse, he noted.

Jennifer Gabris, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, wrote the Associated Press about the policy. U.S. citizens at the Orlando airport can refuse to be scanned if they do not want to provide their photograph, she wrote. However, a notice about a possible rule change for the program says “U.S. citizens may be required to provide photographs upon entering or departing the United States.”

Rudolph said the Orlando announcement marks an increase in the face scan program. “We’re not talking about one gate,” he said. “We’re talking about every international departure gate, which is a huge expansion of the number of people who will be scanned. Errors tend to go up as uses go up.”

Orlando International Airport had about 6 million international passengers in the past year.

Aliqismet BADALOV,
“Khalq qazeti”