EFF – Skip the Surveillance By Opting Out of Face Recognition At Airports – “…It might sound trite, but right now, the key to opting out of face recognition is to be vigilant. There’s no single box you can check, and importantly, it may not be possible for non-U.S. persons to opt out of face recognition entirely. For those who can opt out, you’ll need to spot the surveillance when it’s happening. To start, TSA PreCheck, Clear, and other ways of “skipping the line” often require biometric identification, and are often being used as test cases for these sorts of programs. Once you’re at the airport, be on the lookout for any time a TSA, CBP, or airline employee asks you to look into a device, or when there’s a kiosk or signage like those below. That means your biometric data is probably about to be scanned.

…To skip the surveillance, CBP says you “should notify a CBP Officer or an airline or airport representative in order to seek an alternative means of verifying [your] identity and documents.” Do the same when you encounter this with an airline. While there should be signage near the face recognition area, it may not be clear. If you’re concerned about creating a slight delay for yourself or other passengers, take note: though CBP has claimed to have a 98% accuracy rating in their pilot programs, the Office of the Inspector General could not verify those numbers, and even a 2% error rate would cause thousands of people to be misidentified every day. Most face recognition technology has significantly lower accuracy ratings than that, so you might actually be speeding things up by skipping the surveillance…”