My understanding is that biometric data are contained in your passport, which is already scanned by airlines when you check in and/or board planes.
Here they are using this information to automatically check that it is in fact you instead of having a staff member look at you and check against your passport's photo.
I’m not certain of the particular setup here (per airport thing) but I’ve never had them scan my passport at the gate in a US Airport, only at Immigration checkpoints for international travel and TSA.
This is especially true for domestic travel as well.
For international flights, they traditionally scan your passport at the check-in counter.
As a US citizen, this is mostly just to validate any visa requirements for the country you're traveling to.
However, for non citizens, this data gets sent to CBP to create an exit record. I believe the concern is that between the check-in counter and the flight, you could trade places with someone to effectively overstay a visa without CBP's computer systems noticing (since you'd have a valid exit record)... hence the push for facial recognition at the gate.
At Immigration: Scanned, no, Photographed, yes. (So depending on your definition)
At TSA, They scan the first page of passport (or local ID) and usually Full body scan. So in the strict sense of facially scanned no.
At the gate (until now), neither. They would scan the boarding pass and eyeball the passport if international.
Again the point here is that in the first two instances these are Government agencies doing the scanning. At the third, the Government no longer has anything to do with it.
The question with this stuff is how and where are Airlines (private companies) getting a database of biometric data and what are they doing with it?
They submit the data to the CBP database and get a result back. It will help to validate exit reporting and ensure that the right people are being reported as leaving the country on their I-94s
Yes I suspect this, but the consumer has no way of verifying this.
Similarly it also means that the airlines have access to a Face Oracle and can build their own database with confidence based on that result.
Here they are using this information to automatically check that it is in fact you instead of having a staff member look at you and check against your passport's photo.