Airlines Hustling on Data Disclosure

Major U.S. carriers are scrambling to create disclosure policies that inform customers they might share personal data with the federal government, in response to two highly publicized cases in which airlines secretly handed over private passenger information.

The airlines are working swiftly to alert passengers and protect themselves from liability as the U.S. government is poised to force the carriers as early as next month to turn over data as part of a computerized passenger screening program called CAPPS II.

"We have a lot of work to do here," one airline industry source said. "Everyone agrees there's a sense of urgency because the government wants to get going on CAPPS II as soon as possible."

Somehow, these companies keep getting the idea that "adding it to their privacy policy" constitutes the only appropriate action. We don't want to be informed that our airline has just given all of our personal data to the government... we want our private travel information to be kept, well, private.

Simple math is all that is required to see that terrorists cannot be detected through data mining. It's one thing to start from a list of millions of customers and try to extract from those the few thousand who might be interested in a special price on a ticket to Tahiti; it's quite another to take that same list and try to identify the 19 hijackers on the one flight they plan to hijack. You will inevitably end up harassing thousands of false positives -- people who innocently happen to eat middle eastern food and wear the wrong type of sneakers.