Clear is now a TSA “vendor” for the precheck process. The machines they use for the sign up process - at least the airport I was at - don’t have the eye scanning camera in the kiosk.
The Clear representative I was asking questions of had said they don’t require eye scans for Clear, though that is the default. People can ask to use just fingerprints, which he said does disrupt the terminal process as the agents don’t think to ask if fingerprints were what was registered when the eye scans fail.
I am not advocating for Clear. I refuse to use them. I simply do want to call out that they are one of 3 who handle the process for the TSA now. People do have a choice of which of the three to use.
This is both cool and scary.
A few years ago, I was walking my dog at night just after sunset and looked up as I normally do to star gaze. My eyes caught a glimpse of a fast moving dot moving across the sky. I was getting the ISS reminders at the time and had none for the day, so I opened up Sky Guide and used the gyro feature to identify it. The dot happened to be an old Soviet rocket from the 1950s.
This opened up a different way of thinking about how much we’re tossing into the sky, and if objects are still floating by some 70 years later, what will our sky look like in another 70 with the accelerated launches we have today.
The advancements we’ve made as a human race is amazing, but quite scary at the same time.