Biometric screening at airports uses physical characteristics like your face, fingerprints, or eyes to verify your identity instead of relying solely on a passport or driver’s license. In the United States, facial recognition is now the dominant form, operating at 238 airports for international arrivals and expanding rapidly for domestic travel. The process typically takes under 30 seconds and is designed to replace or speed up the manual ID checks you’re used to at security checkpoints and customs.
How the Technology Works
The most common type of biometric screening at U.S. airports is facial comparison technology. A camera at a checkpoint or kiosk captures a photo of your face, then software compares that live image against a reference photo, usually the one stored in your passport or visa records. The system isn’t searching a massive database of every person in the country. In most cases, it’s a one-to-one comparison: your live face matched against the single photo tied to your travel documents.
A newer approach, called one-to-many matching, compares your face against a smaller gallery of travelers expected at that specific airport on that specific day. This version doesn’t require you to present any ID at all. The system identifies you from the gallery, confirms you have a valid boarding pass, and clears you to proceed. TSA has piloted this at select locations, processing over 400 travelers per hour compared to roughly 180 per hour with manual ID checks.
Some programs also collect fingerprints and iris scans. CLEAR, a private service available at dozens of airports, captures a facial photo, iris scans of both eyes, and all 10 fingerprints during enrollment. That biometric data is encrypted and sent to a secure facility, then forwarded to TSA for a security threat assessment. Once approved, you use your eyes or fingertips at a CLEAR kiosk to skip the standard ID verification line.
Where You’ll Encounter It
Biometric screening shows up at several distinct points in the airport experience, and each one is run by a different agency or company.
- TSA security checkpoints: Credential Authentication Technology (CAT-2) machines at the travel document checker use a camera to compare your face to your ID photo. TSA PreCheck Touchless ID, which lets enrolled members pass through without presenting an ID at all, is expanding to 65 airports by spring 2026.
- International arrivals (Customs and Border Protection): A program called Simplified Arrival uses facial comparison at 238 airports, including all 14 preclearance locations, to process travelers entering the United States. CBP also uses it at 59 airport locations for departing international flights.
- Global Entry kiosks: New Touchless Portals replace the older fingerprint-based kiosks. You walk up, align your face with a silhouette on screen, and two self-adjusting cameras verify your identity. No passport scan is needed unless the system prompts you.
- Baggage drop: Some airlines use biometric verification at bag drop counters for eligible PreCheck and Global Entry members, replacing the usual ID check before you hand off your luggage.
Accuracy Compared to Human Screeners
The facial recognition algorithm TSA uses is one of the highest-performing systems tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In one-to-one matching, it produces false positive rates at or below 0.001%, meaning the chance of incorrectly matching your face to someone else’s photo is extraordinarily low. TSA’s own 2023 testing found a true acceptance rate of 99.3%, with a false positive rate lower than 1 in 250 attempts.
In controlled airport conditions (good lighting, cooperative subjects looking directly at a camera, high-quality equipment), these systems are more accurate than trained human officers at determining whether two photos show the same person. The one-to-many system tested in late 2024 was also more than 99% accurate across all demographic groups, with an average transaction time of just eight seconds.
Demographic fairness has been a persistent concern with facial recognition broadly, but the specific algorithm TSA uses showed the smallest gap in error rates between demographic groups of any system NIST tested. The difference in false positive rates between the highest and lowest performing demographic group was approximately 0.1%.
How to Opt Out
At TSA checkpoints, biometric screening is optional. You can decline the facial photo without any penalty, and you won’t face delays or additional screening as a consequence. TSA is required to post signage at checkpoints indicating that the technology is optional, and the agency is updating its CAT-2 screens to make the opt-out language clearer.
If you decline, a TSA officer will verify your identity using the standard process: examining your physical ID credential at the podium. You don’t need to give a reason or fill out any form. Simply tell the officer you’d prefer not to have your photo taken.
The opt-out picture is more complicated for international travel. CBP’s facial comparison at arrival and departure is tied to legal requirements for verifying the identity of people entering and leaving the country. U.S. citizens can generally opt out of CBP’s biometric process, though non-citizens may not have that option at every point of entry.
What Happens to Your Data
The photo captured at a TSA checkpoint is used for the immediate comparison and is not added to a permanent database. CBP operates under different retention rules depending on citizenship status. For U.S. citizens, photos collected during the entry and exit process are typically deleted within hours. For non-citizens, biometric data may be retained for longer periods as part of immigration enforcement and visa compliance records.
Private services like CLEAR store your biometric data (fingerprints, iris scans, facial images) on an encrypted card and in secured hosting facilities. That data remains on file as long as you’re an active member and is subject to the company’s own privacy policies rather than government retention limits.
CBP has stated its long-term goal is to establish a biometric entry-exit system at all air, sea, and land ports of entry. As of now, the system is fully operational for air entry, partially operational for air exit, and in varying stages of deployment at sea ports and land border crossings for pedestrians. Vehicle lanes at land borders and private aircraft are still in the planning and pilot phase.