Originally Posted by clrankin

Would it occur to the employee that:

1. They are not being paid to make "small talk" with passengers. If they have time to do this, they're either not performing essential duties as much as they could be (and should thus be fired for laziness) or are an unnecessary part of the system with too much time on their hands (and should thus be downsized in a RIF).

2. Passengers may not like to make "small talk" while at the airport, especially when it comes to personal information. There should be no discussion about items like:

- Date of birth. This is PII when coupled with other information and should be treated as such. Imagine a scenario where a TSO says "Have a happy birthday, Mr. Smith." You've now linked a person's name to a birthdate - maybe not a big deal with really common last names like Smith, but a much bigger deal with most other last names.

- Town of residence. It's been discussed before, but worth repeating. This potentially opens someone to various problems like burglary, since it can be fairly easy to discover where a person lives by name and town. This would include casual conversations like "Hey, I've always wanted to try <name of specific restaurant> in <town name>. How is it?"

- Other items. The TSO never knows what a passenger might feel is too personal or revealing to discuss. It could be name, employer, or even destination under some specific circumstances.

As a rule of thumb, TSOs are best off to leave the personal discussion and chit chat to times and locations not associated with their job. If a TDC's job is to check the documents, let's leave it at that. The process flow should be Take Document --> Examine Document --> Return Document to Passenger in 99.9999999999999% of the cases out there. Notice there is no "talk to the passenger" activity outlined.