i’m traveling by air for the holidays and on one of my flights, instead of scanning boarding passes as usual, they had one of those facial recognition scanner tablets they have at TSA checkpoints. weird, but whatever, i’m not as big of a privacy hawk as i should be (not that it would make a difference in this story) so i go through it, and so does everyone else, no problem. but then like 15 minutes before we’re supposed to take off, they announce that because of some failure with the face scanning, the flight attendants have to manually check boarding passes of some passengers while we’re already all on the plane. this turns out to be a clusterfuck that delays the flight by an hour.

when we get to the next airport (not the destination, just a connecting flight), we have to go through their version of TSA, which wouldn’t have been a problem, except their TSA line was completely automated with more of those tablet facial scanner thingies (this one also has a scanner for your passport), and all the scanners to go to the second line were stuck at “please contact the staff”. if takes like 20 more minutes being stuck in line before someone comes around to clear the errors on the tablets. i don’t know what the point of those scanners is btw, since at the end of the second line is a security worker manually checking passports against faces 🙃 and by the time we get to the gate, the airplane has left.

tl;dr massive airline company gives me a facial and fucks me without buying me a drink first

  • hotspur [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    9 days ago

    I saw this recently as a boarding method and it was a total shitshow. The scanners they were using must’ve been touchy, because the staff were super aggro about how it had to be approached down a lane one at a time, it was like a 6’ lane and people kept getting yelled at for encroaching into it. The worst part was they expected a woman’s 2 year old child to do this by themselves, like literally what the fuck guys, you think 2 year olds are gonna be happy being separated from mom and told to walk alone, etc. I was so pissed generally about the stupid thing and it didn’t make the boarding process faster or easier, just more tense. We still all got stuck in the boarding tunnel for 10 minutes. It was also the third obvious facial recognition scan we were expected to just accept during the security/immigration/boarding process.