From MIT's Technology Review, November 20:
The company that has helped millions of people cut security lines wants to give you a frictionless future—in exchange for your face.
If you’ve ever been through a large US airport, you’re probably at least vaguely aware of Clear. Maybe your interest (or irritation) has been piqued by the pods before the security checkpoints, the attendants in navy blue vests who usher clients to the front of the security line (perhaps just ahead of you), and the sometimes pushy sales pitches to sign up and skip ahead yourself. After all, is there anything people dislike more than waiting in line?
Its position in airports has made Clear Secure, with its roughly $3.75 billion market capitalization, the most visible biometric identity company in the United States. Over the past two decades, Clear has put more than 100 lanes in 58 airports across the US, and in the past decade it has entered 17 sports arenas and stadiums, from San Jose to Denver to Atlanta. Now you can also use its identity verification platform to rent tools at Home Depot, put your profile in front of recruiters on LinkedIn, and, as of this month, verify your identity as a rider on Uber.
And soon enough, if Clear has its way, it may also be in your favorite retailer, bank, and even doctor’s office—or anywhere else that you currently have to pull out a wallet (or, of course, wait in line). The company that has helped millions of vetted members skip airport security lines is now working to expand its “frictionless,” “face-first” line-cutting service from the airport to just about everywhere, online and off, by promising to verify that you are who you say you are and you are where you are supposed to be. In doing so, CEO Caryn Seidman Becker told investors in an earnings call earlier this year, it has designs on being no less than the “identity layer of the internet,” as well as the “universal identity platform” of the physical world.
All you have to do is show up—and show your face.
This is enabled by biometric technology, but Clear is far more than just a biometrics company. As Seidman Becker has told investors, “biometrics aren’t the product … they are a feature.” Or, as she put it in a 2022 podcast interview, Clear is ultimately a platform company “no different than Amazon or Apple”—with dreams, she added, “of making experiences safer and easier, of giving people back their time, of giving people control, of using technology for … frictionless experiences.” (Clear did not make Seidman Becker available for an interview.)
While the company has been building toward this sweeping vision for years, it now seems the time has finally come. A confluence of factors is currently accelerating the adoption of—even necessity for—identity verification technologies: increasingly sophisticated fraud, supercharged by artificial intelligence that is making it harder to distinguish who or what is real; data breaches that seem to occur on a near daily basis; consumers who are more concerned about data privacy and security; and the lingering effects of the pandemic’s push toward “contactless” experiences.
All of this is creating a new urgency around ways to verify information, especially our identities—and, in turn, generating a massive opportunity for Clear. For years, Seidman Becker has been predicting that biometrics will go mainstream.
But now that biometrics have, arguably, gone mainstream, what—and who—bears the cost? Because convenience, even if chosen by only some of us, leaves all of us wrestling with the effects. Some critics warn that not everyone will benefit from a world where identity is routed through Clear—maybe because it’s too expensive, and maybe because biometric technologies are often less effective at identifying people of color, people with disabilities, or those whose gender identity may not match what official documents say.
What’s more, says Kaliya Young, an identity expert who has advised the US government, having a single private company “disintermediating” our biometric data—especially facial data—is the wrong “architecture” to manage identity. “It seems they are trying to create a system like login with Google, but for everything in real life,” Young warns. While the single sign-on option that Google (or Facebook or Apple) provides for websites and apps may make life easy, it also poses greater security and privacy risks by putting both our personal data and the keys to it in the hands of a single profit-driven entity: “We’re basically selling our identity soul to a private company, who’s then going to be the gatekeeper … everywhere one goes.”
Though Clear remains far less well known than Google, more than 27 million people have already helped it become that very gatekeeper—and “one of the largest private repositories of identities on the planet,” as Nicholas Peddy, Clear’s chief technology officer, put it in an interview with MIT Technology Review this summer.
With Clear well on the way to realizing its plan for a frictionless future, it’s time to try to understand both how we got here and what we have (been) signed up for.
A new frontier in identity management
Imagine this: On a Friday morning in the near future, you are rushing to get through your to-do list before a weekend trip to New York.
In the morning, you apply for a new job on LinkedIn. During lunch, assured that recruiters are seeing your professional profile because it’s been verified by Clear, you pop out to Home Depot, confirm your identity with a selfie, and rent a power drill for a quick bathroom repair. Then, in the midafternoon, you drive to your doctor’s office; having already verified your identity—prompted by a text message sent a few days earlier—you confirm your arrival with a selfie at a Clear kiosk. Before you go to bed, you plan your morning trip to the airport and set an alarm—but not too early, because you know that with Clear, you can quickly drop your bags and breeze through security.
Once you’re in New York, you head to Barclays Center, where you’ll be seeing your favorite singer; you skip the long queue out front to hop in the fast-track Clear line. It’s late when the show is over, so you grab an Uber home and barely need to wait for a driver, who feels more comfortable thanks to your verified rider profile.
At no point did you pull out your driver’s license or fill out repetitive paperwork. All that was already on file. Everything was easy; everything was frictionless....
....MUCH MORE
But what about voting, American style? Where nobody knows your name, but they're always glad you came...
