Skip the Line at Airport Security. All It Costs Is Your Face.

I have a robust beard. Not out of any aesthetic commitment—though I do admire Billy Gibbons’ dedication to the craft—but because I’m lazy. In the summer, I trim it to stubble. By Christmas, I look like Santa Claus. That variability has consequences.

Facial recognition systems are increasingly common at airports, and they are not always forgiving of a face that drifts between five o’clock shadow and full Saint Nick. My passport photo lives somewhere in the middle, which means there’s a decent chance my face doesn’t match the system scanning it. The fix is quick, but it turns an automated process into a manual one—and a manual one usually involves a person in a uniform who does not find the situation as amusing as I do.

Which brings me to TSA’s new “touchless ID,” a facial recognition screening system now rolling out at airports across the country. It is either the most convenient thing to happen to air travel since the rolling suitcase—or a privacy trade-off you’re making without fully reading the terms (because who does?).

Possibly both.

The Pitch

Step up to a camera-equipped kiosk. Look into it. An algorithm matches your face against the photo ID you uploaded when you opted in. You have to do this for each airline separately, which is exactly the kind of minor hassle that makes you wonder how “touchless” this really is. But once it’s done: no fumbling for your wallet. No handing your license to a stranger in a uniform. Just you, a camera, and a green light.

When it works.

And that’s a meaningful caveat, because the “T” in TSA does not stand for technology. These are the people who spent two decades perfecting the art of making you remove your shoes. Trusting them with bleeding-edge biometrics requires a certain optimism I don't have. Yet.

Right now, at airports where it’s deployed, these lanes are noticeably shorter—sometimes dramatically so. Most travelers either don’t know it exists, don’t trust it, or both. You can walk past the standard ID-check queue, step up to the camera, and catch the look from people in the regular line: wondering who you are and why you got expedited.

That window of opportunity has an expiration date.

The PreCheck Problem, Repeated

When TSA PreCheck launched in 2011, it felt like a superpower: shorter lines, shoes on, laptops in the bag. It genuinely transformed the airport experience.

Then everyone got it.

Today, at many airports and during peak travel times, PreCheck lines can rival—or exceed—standard security wait times. When enough people sign up for the fast lane, it stops being fast.

Touchless ID is on the same trajectory. Right now, it’s being praised as a way to cut through long security lines. A year from now, once adoption catches up, the conversation may look very different.

My skepticism isn’t purely theoretical. When TSA began accepting digital IDs—where you tap your phone instead of handing over a physical license—I was among the first to try. I have yet to make it work. Every attempt ends the same way: the system fails, the agent asks for my ID, the people behind me grumble. Janet, who never bothered with the digital ID, waits for me on the other side of the checkpoint, giving me the look.

Will touchless ID follow the same pattern? I don’t know. But I’m not ruling it out.

It’s also worth noting what touchless ID doesn’t replace. It gets you past the ID check—that’s it. You still wait in line for the bag scanner. Your bags are still scanned. You still walk through a detector or body scanner. It’s shaving time off one step in a multi-step process. Worth having, yes. Worth celebrating? Let’s see how it does first.

About That Green Light

When you hand your driver’s license to a TSA agent, the interaction lasts a few seconds and leaves no record. Even “the look” is short-lived.

When you submit your face to a biometric scanner, you are contributing to a database that lives on.

The rules governing that database—retention periods, access, future use—are far murkier than the green light at the kiosk suggests. TSA sits under DHS. So does ICE.

TSA says images of travelers who aren’t flagged are deleted within 12 hours. OK. Maybe they are. How do I know? I don’t. “We’ll delete it in 12 hours” carries the same reassuring energy as “the check is in the mail.”

And there’s a broader pattern: biometric systems built for one purpose tend to expand into others. The infrastructure doesn’t disappear when you collect your luggage. It persists. The data it generates, even if erased, can be recovered, subpoenaed, integrated with other datasets, and used in ways that haven’t yet been decided—by administrations that haven’t yet been elected, and some already in office.

Participation Is Voluntary. For Now.

You have to opt in for TSA’s touchless ID program. For now.

Whether that remains true at scale—and whether it truly is optional when the alternative is a much longer and slower line—is an open question. Airport security has a long history of temporary measures becoming permanent fixtures. Once the infrastructure is in place, the case for making it universal becomes bureaucratically irresistible.

Full Disclosure

I have to confess: in spite of everything I just said, I have Global Entry. I’m an advocate for it. When I re-enter the U.S., I look at a camera for a few seconds and walk past a line that can take an hour or longer, then pat myself on the back for making such a wise decision. Every. Time.

Global Entry is a biometric system too.

So why am I comfortable with that and skeptical of this? Call it Jeff logic. Global Entry’s use of facial recognition works—beard or no beard. The benefit to me is immediate, consistent, and significant. TSA’s use of the technology as a screening tool that replaces humans currently doing the job feels different: the benefit is narrower and more on them than me, the execution is unproven, and the agency running it has a track record that doesn’t always inspire confidence.

After all that, you’d think I’d be the last person to opt into touchless ID.

But I did. My face is already stored in more databases than I can count. Between that and the dark web breaches that have compromised far more than just my photo, opting in felt more like a formality than a decision. Janet and I both spit into tubes for a DNA ancestry kit without a second thought. That’s a far more intimate dataset than a photo at a TSA checkpoint, and with even fewer guardrails.

I’m in the program. I’ll report back. Call me cautiously pessimistic.

The Bottom Line

You’re handing over biometric data in exchange for a convenience that is, by design, temporary. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how much you trust the system holding your face—and how much you trust it five years from now.

I enrolled in Global Entry because the benefit was obvious, and I’ve never regretted it. I opted into touchless ID because—well, why not? If nothing else, I’ll find out whether the system can tell the difference between five o’clock shadow Jeff and Santa Jeff.

And if it can handle that, maybe I’ll go full Billy Gibbons—and let the algorithm sort it out.