Continental Airlines is the first airline to get rid of paper tickets. Instead, you can now use your cell phone as your ticket and boarding pass. How it works is the airline sends you a digital two-dimensional bar code, which you put on your cell phone’s screen. The bar code is scanned and you can board. This new system is being tested in Houston for the next three months, and some of the benefits are that it saves trees, and it’s one less thing to remember to pack. Continental may be the first U.S. airline that has adopted this new system, but other airlines like U.S. Airways and Delta are already looking into acquiring the service.
In regards to this new system, some say that “the whole bar code scanning tech seems a bit quaint. Why cant we just move on to global RFID tags already?” RFID tags are what the government puts into soldiers. They are injected under the skin, so by simply scanning their skin they can know everything about the person. People are wondering why we are only moving one step up and putting bar codes on our phones when we could take two steps and just implant everyone with RFID tags. That way you just have to go and scan your arm or whatever, and they would know your name your flight and everything. I think that that is a bit extreme. While it does seem that that is the way society is heading, I would never want to have some kind of chip in me that would tell other people everything about me. It would be such an invasion of privacy, because what if part of it is GPS? Then people could always know where you are. Personally, I don’t like this idea at all, and I think that we need to be very careful with how far we are going with our technology. But, as far as the digital boarding passes go, I am a recycler so I like that it saves trees.
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The concept of your boarding pass being on your cell phone even is a little weird to me. I agree that it would save trees and that would definitely be a plus but I feel like my cell phone isnt quite reliable enough to have something as important as my boarding pass loaded onto it. I know that there have been many times in the past when I have missed an important phone call when my phone hasn't even rang and I wouldnt want anything like that to happen if it was in regards to getting on a plane to go home to anywhere else for that matter. And in regards to the injection I think I would move countries if that was to start occuring, I mean come on I need a little freedom still.
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