Thanks to Dennis Schaal (www.tnooz.com
@denschaal on Twitter) FareCompare Deals Guest Blogger

The next time you book a flight from an airline or travel agency, you’ll notice that you will be required to enter additional information about yourself.

It’s all part of the TSA’s Secure Flight Program. The agency has been rolling this out over the last year and it is now in full swing.

If you book a domestic or international flight on Continental.com or on Travelocity, for instance, you’ll now be asked to enter your exact name as it appears on your passport or driver’s license, your date of birth, your gender and, if applicable, your redress number. (The redress number is a TSA-provided number for travelers who believe they’ve erroneously hassled or denied boarding because they’ve been matched to a bad guy on a government watch list.)

Why is this being done – and how to breeze through the process? Keep reading…

It’s all part of a renewed effort by the TSA to maintain the safety of the skies. Essentially what is happening is that the TSA has taken over from the airlines the responsibility to vet passengers against the various watch lists. And, major travel reservations systems like Sabre and Worldspan, which provide much of the behind-the-scenes infrastructure for airline websites and travel agencies, got their act together and have tweaked their systems to enable the airlines to transmit your more-detailed information to the TSA.

I am a privacy advocate and have railed at times about online travel agencies transmitting consumers’ cookie information to advertising networks so they might serve ads at you at every step, even on nontravel websites.

But, I don’t believe the TSA’s new data collection efforts are too onerous — as long as the TSA takes steps to safeguard the information and doesn’t expand its probing. After all, the TSA is not asking for credit card or lifestyle information, and if the few new personal details requested would stop a terrorist from getting on board and commandeering a plane, then I am all for it.

One way for travelers to avoid having to enter the same required information each time they book an airline ticket is to update their profile information in their frequent flyer accounts or in their profiles maintained by online and traditional travel agencies. The information will be stored in your account profile and transferred to your reservation automatically. If you book direct on airline websites, you would have to update the information for each airline.

When American Airlines announced the introduction of Secure Flight for tickets purchased Sept. 15 and later, and stated that travelers could streamline the data-entry process by joining AAdvantage, my marketing radar immediately got pinged.

Was American Airlines turning Secure Flight, a serious government program to thwart terrorism, into a marketing pitch?

Well, indeed there is an element of marketing in it for American Airlines, but there is also a technical reason behind it. Airlines generally access passenger profiles from their internal reservations systems through the carriers’ frequent flyer programs. So, I can only slam American Airlines a little for enticing carriers to join AAdvantage in the airline’s Secure Flight press release.

Now, with many domestic airlines beginning to transmit this new passenger data to the TSA, the next step is that the U.S. is prodding international carriers and foreign governments to comply — and this would be a huge hurdle to clear because of more acute privacy sensitivities abroad.