'SMILE' - U.S. Customs Quietly Launches Facial Recognition Experiment at DC Airport.

U.S. Customs Quietly Launches Facial Recognition Experiment at DC Airport. (Vice).

The next time you come back from overseas and flash your American passport at Washington, DC’s Dulles airport, customs officers might take a picture of you and use facial recognition technology to figure out if you really are who you say you are.

On March 11, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) quietly rolled out a new facial recognition pilot program to help custom officers catch “imposters,” or people using a passport that isn’t theirs, an agency spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard on Wednesday.

The pilot is part of a larger effort to modernize US customs practices with the use of new technologies as part of the Apex Air Entry and E?xit Re-Engineering (AEER) Project.

And it’s only the first of at least ?three experiments labeled “Targeted Biometric Operations,” according to a previously undisclosed CBP presentation obtained by Motherboard.


The goal of the pilot program, called “1:1 Facial Recognition Air Entry Pilot,” is to figure out if facial recognition can be a useful tool in catching these imposters, but civil liberties activists worry this is the first step to create a database of law-abiding Americans’ mugshots, which could create unforeseen privacy risks. Hmmm.......Reminds me of the 'renewed' Toronto Pearson airport departure terminal. If interested in a meal or drink you order by your personal IPad (With Camera), pay through provided bankcard terminal and receive a receipt if you enter your E Mail address....any other info needed? Read the full story here.

Want to disable Facebook facial recognition? Read this.

Want to disable Facebook facial recognition? Read this.(NakedSecurity).Facebook is acquiring facial recognition firm Face.com, for an estimated $60 million.Facebook already uses Face.com's facial recognition technology to help it put a name to faces in photos uploaded to the social network. Now, with the acquisition of Face.com, the technology is coming in house. So what does Facebook facial recognition actually do? There are billions of photographs on Facebook's servers. As your Facebook friends upload their pictures, Facebook will try to determine if any of the photos look like you. And if it finds what it believes to be a match, it may urge one of your Facebook friends to tag the photo with your name. That's what Facebook does with its facial recognition database right now. But nobody knows what it might do with it in the future. Questions which are raised by Facebook's facial recognition capabilities include how securely the database of information is stored, and how else might Facebook try to use it - including whether they might use the data to make money. So.. How can you disable Facebook's facial recognition technology? Sadly, you can't.Read the full story here.