The Paper Passport Is Dying

IN A MATTER of years, no matter where you live or travel, your face will likely be your new passport.

For centuries, people have used some form of passport while moving from place to place. But the widespread standardization of passports as we know them today didn’t really begin until after World War 1 when passports were commonly used as a security measure and to deter spies from entering a country. Even then, some considered passports to be an “anachronism in the modern world.”

But the use of paper passports—which were first digitized as “e-Passports” with NFC chips in 2006—is slowly undergoing one of its biggest transformations to date. The travel industry, airports, and governments are working to remove the need to show your passport while flying internationally. Eventually, you may not need to carry your passport at all.

Instead, face recognition technology and smartphones are increasingly being used to check and confirm your identity against travel details before you can fly. These systems, advocates claim, can reduce the amount of waiting time and “friction” you experience at airports. But privacy experts caution that there is little transparency about the technologies being deployed, and their proliferation could lead to data breaches and greater levels of surveillance.

The push to remove paper passports is happening worldwide. So far, airports in Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, India, and elsewhere have been trialing various levels of passport-free travel or the technology needed to make it happen. In October, officials in Singapore announced that its residents can fly to and from the country without using their documentation, and foreign visitors can “enjoy the convenience of passport-less clearance when they depart Singapore.” More than 1.5 million people have used the systems, officials claim.

“It’s probably going to become the mainstream way of traveling, as I understand, in the near future,” says Athina Ioannou, a lecturer in business analytics at the University of Surrey in the UK, who has researched the privacy implications that come with different types of travel. Ioannou says the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated contact-free travel, and many efforts are driven by trying to get passengers moving quickly through airports.

One of the most commonly tested approaches is using a “digital travel credential.” A DTC, according to the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which is behind the approach, is made up of two parts: a virtual element, which represents the information stored on passports, and a physical part, the bit on your phone. The two are cryptographically linked to ensure they’re not forgeries. “The key feature of the ICAO DTC is that authorities can verify a digital representation of the passport data before the traveler’s arrival and confirm the data’s integrity and authenticity,” a description of the system says.

Three different approaches to the DTC exist, with two requiring you to carry (but not necessarily use) paper passports, while the third approach, which may be some years down the line, doesn’t require a passport to even be issued. Earlier this year, border officials in Finland held a small-scale trial of a DTC on 22 airline routes, using a mobile app that had been developed. While passengers still had to carry passports, the country’s Border Guard concluded that checks lasted for just eight seconds, with the technical processing happening in two seconds. “Speed is really essential here if we are talking about facilitating a huge number of people,” Mikko Väisänen, the head of the DTC pilot, says.

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