With sincere apologies, I need to ask you to imagine yourself arriving at the airport. Freshly expelled from whatever mode of transport brought you there, you are probably at least a little bit harried. Maybe you’re running late or you’re wrangling small children. Maybe you are weighed down by an overstuffed tote bag and a roll-aboard that could burst at any moment because you are opposed in principle to paying $50 to check a bag. The stink of anxiety sweat has begun to emanate from your person.
Waiting for you once you enter is the center of much airport melodrama: the TSA line. What you will encounter there is anyone’s guess. You might hand over your ID to an agent and swing your bag onto the luggage scanner’s belt near instantly, or hundreds of people might be in line in front of you. Can your laptop go in the same bin as your purse? Is your cardigan a shirt that you can continue wearing, or is it a jacket that needs to be removed? You’ll find out when you find out, usually when someone with a badge yells at you.
Travel can be one of life’s great joys, but the airport is, at its absolute best, a necessary obstacle to the eventual reward of visiting loved ones or experiencing a new place. At worst, it’s a “ghastly purgatory,” in the words of my colleague Ian Bogost, riven with long waits, bad food, surprise fees, cramped quarters, spontaneous schedule changes, and lots of people acting like absolute unsocialized freaks. All of this chaos is subject to strict surveillance and regulation, and almost everything that happens once you enter an airport is out of your control.
But what if you could wrest some of that control back? That’s the promise behind Clear, whose employees you’ve likely encountered in the past few years while flying: They’re the smiling faces in neat checked shirts standing in front of a bank of sleek white consoles. They’re friendlier than most TSA agents, and they’ve got a deal to offer you: Fork over your ID, let them scan your eyeballs, pay nothing today, and they’ll whisk you to the front of the line. Even if you’ve never taken the bait yourself, you’ve probably seen Clear employees pick off a few late-arriving travelers from the back of the line you’re already waiting in. Maybe you’ve even had the service’s subscribers inserted in front of you just as it was your turn to pass through the checkpoint, violating a rule of civil society so basic that the average preschooler knows it: Cutting in line is wrong, and the people who have waited the longest should go next.
Clear is a strange phenomenon. It is in some ways similar to—and operates alongside—TSA PreCheck, the federal government’s own paid-clearance service that ferries travelers more efficiently through airport screening. But unlike PreCheck, it’s an independent, private company, woven into airports’ disorienting economy along with Hudson News and Dunkin’. At its core, Clear is a biometric-data company, and the dismal experience of getting on an airplane has helped it do what few biometrics start-ups have managed to do: persuade millions of eager consumers to hand over their personal information and an annual fee. Lots of those start-ups aspire to turn your index finger or eyeball into an ID or a credit card, among other things, but Clear may be the one that’s gotten closest to making that tech-industry dream a reality.
Clear is something else too. The service exists because American air travel is a needlessly punishing process, and navigating security is one of its worst bottlenecks. The enormous, intractable hassle of the airport has proved to be fertile ground for private-sector services designed to make the process of getting on a plane marginally more bearable. As travel rates surge, the airport, already heavily mediated by private-sector perks for high-spenders, has only become more stuffed with premium services and elite conveniences. When everything is a perk, what’s left of the public good?
Like many things about contemporary American air travel, Clear’s presence in airports is an indirect result of 9/11. Its predecessor, Verified Identity Pass, or VIP, was founded in the aftermath of the attacks, when the federal government was looking for companies that could expedite security procedures for people who flew a lot and were regarded as a low security risk, such as business travelers. VIP’s signature product—confusingly also called Clear—gathered about 200,000 clients before the company filed for bankruptcy, in 2009. At that point, according to a 2020 story on Clear by the journalist Dave Gershgorn, it was bought by a duo of former hedge-fund managers who envisioned a life beyond government contracting for their new service.
VIP was rebranded to Clear, and the company, which had previously issued express-pass cards to its members, pivoted to biometrics. To sign up for Clear’s marquee offering, Clear Plus, the company scans your irises and fingerprints, verifies your identity, and charges a $189-a-year fee after the initial free month for people who sign up at the airport. For that price, you get escorted to the front of the security line at the 52 North American airports where the company currently operates. If you have both Clear and TSA PreCheck, the service puts you at the front of the PreCheck line, so you can also keep your shoes on.
For anyone who doesn’t have Clear Plus, the sales pitches and line-cutting can be pretty annoying. Clear’s argument is that its services help security run more smoothly for all travelers. In an email, a company spokesperson, Annabel Walsh, described Clear as a “force multiplier” for airport efficiency: Travelers who get verified via Clear don’t need to have their IDs checked by TSA, which frees up agents to check others. Airports also permit Clear salespeople to pull double duty by answering questions for travelers, Walsh told me. This appears to have upsides for both the company and the airport: Low pay and difficult work make attracting and retaining airport staff a constant struggle, so Clear salespeople can theoretically fill in some customer-assistance gaps while also finding solid opportunities to pitch their product. When someone signs up, the airport gets a cut of their subscription fee, which, according to Gershgorn’s investigation, can add up to millions of dollars a year. (Walsh did not confirm this amount when asked.)
Walsh told me that Clear’s programs currently have 16 million members. Not all of them pay for the line-jumping ease of Clear Plus: The company offers free programs—including one that allows you to reserve a time to go through security at some airports, and another that provides an express lane to get into some stadiums and arenas—that anyone can use after downloading a free app and uploading a selfie. Meanwhile, many of Clear Plus’s members join because the program has become a common feature in the elite tiers of consumer-loyalty programs. Delta and United, which have both invested in Clear, will cover all or part of the Clear Plus fee for frequent fliers, and American Express Platinum cardholders get a full statement credit for a solo membership. Although Walsh adamantly opposed the idea that Clear could be regarded as a perk instead of a vital bit of security infrastructure, it is indeed a pretty popular perk.
As Clear’s move into stadiums and arenas suggests, the company’s biggest ambitions span beyond air travel. Clear wants to expand its verification technologies into other domains of modern life that require waiting and fumbling around for identification. In particular, the company has designs on the health-care industry. Earlier in the pandemic, Clear developed a free service to verify members’ vaccination status and recent test results, and Walsh told me that in the future, Clear verification could be used to do things like unlock a patient’s medical records, insurance card, and co-pay; the company is currently working on such a system with University of Miami Health. Clear, or a company like it, could one day function as a one-stop shop for your personal identity, a middleman between you and the government, your doctor, your professional licensing, and potentially much more. Instead of getting your insurance card out of your wallet or tapping your phone against a card reader to use Apple Pay, all of it would be contained within your fingerprint.
For whatever company that manages to make all of this a widely adopted reality, there is significant upside to be gained—not only in contracting for the services themselves and selling memberships to use them, but potentially also in the treasure trove of data collected. The minute details of your travel habits, medical history, event attendance, and purchases, all compiled into a single user profile with a verified identity, can be worth a lot of money. Clear is adamant that the company does not and will not sell or give any user data to third parties without permission from individual users. Even so, as Gershgorn points out, many major tech companies that take in massive amounts of revenue through advertisements do not technically sell user data to third parties either. Facebook, for instance, sells access to pools of consumers who meet an advertiser’s desired demographic criteria through ad targeting.
Walsh told me that the only thing Clear uses member data for is to provide services to its members, and that it does not monetize its data through promotional targeting. The privacy policy that governs Clear’s services would at least seem to allow it, however. The policy stipulates that Clear may use everything but its biometric and health data to conduct marketing and consumer research, contact members about products and services from its marketing partners, and “offer our consumers products or services we believe may be of interest to them.” Walsh defended the policy, saying it “allows Clear to keep our members informed about new Clear services, and helps us prioritize what new services to build for our members.”
Feeling a little creeped out by Clear is easy, no matter how widely its employees smile at you as you slog toward your gate. There are many arguments against data collection, but the main one is pretty simple: The more companies know about you, the easier it becomes for them to manipulate you in weak moments or part you from your money. If you’ve ever been buried under ads about wedding vendors or baby products after a little light googling that might imply you’re newly engaged or pregnant, then you know how readily these unseen forces can discern the most intimate details of your life. Wariness of these practices is a big reason so many biometrics companies have a difficult time finding eager customers. If the value proposition is the ability to pay with your fingerprint in exchange for all of your personal data, you might rightly decide that it’s not that hard to tap a credit card or your phone against a reader.
That said, commercial life in America has shown time and again that people tend to be happy to relinquish all kinds of personal information for the right amount of convenience. The fact that Clear has amassed millions of members makes a fairly convincing case that traversing American airport security is simply that grim; people are ready to skip the line, fingerprints be damned. In this regard, Clear’s close ties with consumer-loyalty programs makes particular sense. Loyalty programs are one of the most popular ways to make personal-data gathering palatable to the general public: You agree to have your behavior tracked under a unique identifier such as a frequent-flier number, then you get discounts or conveniences or special perks. Many people might not even realize the bargain they’re making, but many others seem perfectly fine with it. If you can save a little on your grocery bill, who cares if Kroger has a slightly easier time tracking what you’ve purchased?
Skepticism, in other words, might not be a real issue for Clear. Instead, their biggest hurdle might actually be the opposite: a rush for any services that attempt to game the airport’s system. By finding advantage in the chaos of American airline travel, Clear has entered an arms race that might not be winnable, for it or anyone else. The nature of the company’s business means that it always has to remain a step ahead of the airport crowd. If that crowd catches up, Clear will be overwhelmed by the infrastructural flaws on top of which it’s built—a phenomenon that only helps generate more new private-sector services to make things a little less bad for the people who fly the most.
Gary Leff, an airline-industry expert and the founder of the travel website View From the Wing, told me that for years, airline watchers have been asking the TSA to make simple changes that they argue would speed up the screening process without compromising safety—ending the war on carry-on liquids, allowing small scissors, letting people keep their shoes on and leave their laptops in their bags. These changes would address the bottlenecks where they’re most likely to happen: not at the ID checkpoint from which Clear Plus exempts its members, but from the part immediately after that, where you and all your belongings get a visual once-over. They’d also be free and benefit all travelers. TSA has maintained that the procedures in place are essential for safety. These kinds of changes tend to become political footballs, which makes it difficult to do anything that could be construed as too permissive. It’s even more difficult, according to Leff, to get the kinds of changes that would make the biggest difference in your experience at the airport—namely, more funding for the woefully understaffed Federal Aviation Administration and for capital improvements at America’s aging airports.
So instead, occasional fliers suffer through unpredictable security lines, and frequent travelers arbitrage airline and credit-card perks. Their frustration is legible in the popularity of TSA PreCheck, which costs $78 for a five-year membership: By early 2022, the number of members in the Department of Homeland Security’s Trusted Traveler programs (most of whom are PreCheck users) had increased 44 percent from before the pandemic, to nearly 30 million people, according to the travel site The Points Guy. That popularity is also something of an Achilles heel. The program’s members may have their own line, but it’s subject to the same issues of understaffing and aging infrastructure as all the others, and the more people use the program, the more the PreCheck line looks like the regular one.
The thing about perks is that people pursue them. Catering to people who fly constantly has a way of making a service crowded, because, well, those people are at the airport all the time. As Clear has grown, it’s encountered some of the same issues as PreCheck. Namely, you might find yourself once again having to wait, this time to have your iris or fingertip scanned. Leff, who told me he’s a longtime, mostly satisfied Clear member, said that since travel volume has picked up again after the height of the pandemic, he sometimes just gets his ID out and goes to the PreCheck line because it looks like it’ll be faster than waiting to check in with Clear. (Walsh told me that on average, Clear members wait for less than five minutes.)
Infrastructural bottlenecks like TSA can’t be solved with private-sector services, because all you’re really doing is temporarily outrunning the crowd. Eventually, even with an expensive service like Clear, too many people will catch up, and the problem underlying it all still won’t be fixed. “The more people who have access to it, the longer the lines you’re going to face,” Leff said. “At some level, it’s potentially just a temporary reprieve.”