A Clear Solution

Clear will speed you throughlong lines at the stadium orairport. All it costs is $179 and your personal biometric data.

- J.J.Mccorvey

The mid August Sun is unkind as hundreds of baseball fans—fresh off the equally oppressive Bronx subway platform— stand in a line at Gate 6 outside Yankee Stadium clenching bottled waters. While they wait to empty their pockets, open their purses, and walk through one of the magnetron scanners to see their home team take a beating from the Tampa Bay Rays, a middle-aged man zips past the queue through a separate lane and presses his fingers against a screen at a kiosk with the word CLEAR emblazoned on the sides in blue. I flag him down. The 50-year-old is a New York City resident and three-year member of the Clear program. Was he concerned at all, I ask, about giving a private company his fingerprints simply for the ability to skip a line?

He seems surprised by my question. “Clear having my fingerprints is the least of my worries,” he says. “I’m more worried about my computer getting hacked or something.”

Americans really hate lines. Clear, the New York–based company that counts millions of U.S. citizens (or legal residents) as loyal customers, is betting that the perk we enjoy for handing companies our GPS data, contacts, passwords, and home address—convenience— will also entice more of us to fork over the last piece of personal data we retain in the digital age: our bodies. After persuading members to trust it with their fingerprints, irises, and faces (for $179 annually), Clear treats them to speedier, more seamless experiences at an increasing number of places known for congestion and inefficiency. Clear’s revenue more than doubled in the past year, and the company became profitable in the fourth quarter of 2017. Its biometric service enables fliers at 25 U.S. airports to skip the line for ID verification and scurry straight to the scan, while sports and entertainment fans who attend its 14 partner venues can bypass those sweaty security queues.