In this digital era, there has been a considerable rise in technological developments. This increase has contributed, among others, to the travelling industry which has made travelling easier and more popular. The popularity can be seen by the growing number of international arrivals per year which has reached 1.4 billion arrivals in 2019 (Roser n.d.). However, technology has also been implemented in other aspects of the industry that you probably did not think about, for instance in passports. When travelling your passport is the most essential item that you have to carry with you. You may, probably, have experienced that you forgot, lost, or even worse, that your passport was stolen (Thales Group n.d.-a). This can lead to not being able to travel because you cannot identify yourself. However, it seems like these issues will likely remain in the past, as physical passports will be preterit.
Currently, physical passports include some type of technology; an electronic chip is embedded in the passport which contains your data (Thales Group n.d.-a; Ledsom 2020). Nevertheless, it is still required to have a passport with you when travelling, but, as mentioned before, this is not really convenient. The solution seems to lie in digital passports where personal data, for example, biometric information, visa, and digital picture, are stored in the cloud. This results in eliminating the need for a physical passport (Thales Group n.d.-a). Imagine that you are travelling to go abroad, when arriving at the airport you identify yourself, for instance, through your face or eye. The airport system then retrieves your information from the cloud and enables you to access, hereby excluding the necessity of a physical passport. The overall process of entering would then be automated. Moreover, travellers could be provided access to their data by using their phones. Making it possible for the person to see a digital copy of the data that is stored in the cloud and checking if their requested visa has been uploaded to the cloud (Thales Group n.d.-b). Therefore, it could be said that digital passports will disrupt to some extent airports as it changes the manner of travelling.
Digitizing passports presents some challenges, namely, to make cloud passports possible a centralized data storage is needed (Thales Group n.d.-a). However, there is legislation concerning the mass storage of data which forms an obstacle. Furthermore, GDPR needs to be met since the data will contain sensitive information, and travellers have to adapt to the adjustments. Nevertheless, digitizing passports also have benefits, such as crossing the border will speed up owing to the faster passport controls. Moreover, the risk of losing or theft will disappear, and national security will increase as countries have a better overview of who is entering (Infineon 2020). In this manner the travel experience, as we know, will change and subsequently will be reshaped (Thales Group n.d.-a).
In 2015 Australia was the first country to try cloud passports, however, since then not much has been heard of the passport (Airport Technology 2020). Until recently, digital passports have come up again due to the Covid-19 pandemic which has had a negative impact on the travel industry. In order to continue to provide their service during this time the industry must make it possible for people to be able to travel without touching. This means that processes like passport controls need to be done touch-free which the digital passport enables. In this manner, travellers are more safe and secure than before (Airport Technology 2020). It could be said that Covid-19 is accelerating to implement this type of technology (Ledsom 2020).
In conclusion, as digitization will become an important aspect in the near future, it looks like changing passports will be inevitable. However, in which manner and form these changes will happen only the time will tell. Eventually, the passport of today will not be the passport of tomorrow. What is your perception of the future of passports? Moreover, are you open to having your personal data to be stored in a cloud? Or would you prefer to have your own paper passport?
References
Airport Technology (2020). The rise of touchless technology at airports. [Online] Available at https://www.airport-technology.com/features/touchless-technology-airports/
Infineon (n.d.). The electronic passport of the future – Infineon Technologies. [Online] Available at https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/applications/security/government-identification/electronic-passport/
Ledsom, A. (2020). How The Pandemic Is Accelerating The Death Of Paper Passports. [Online] Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2020/08/01/how-the-pandemic-is-accelerating-the-death-of-paper-passports/#4704a9dee2f6
Roser, M. (n.d.). Tourism. [Online] Available at https://ourworldindata.org/tourism
Thales Group (n.d.-a). Future of travel (traveling without a passport). [Online] Available at https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/digital-identity-and-security/government/eborder/future-of-travel
Thales Group (n.d.-b). Virtual passport: your passport in the cloud? [Online] Available at https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/digital-identity-and-security/government/passport/virtual-passport
Hi Florita, nice essay! Personally speaking, I did not know anything about the digitization of passports before reading this article, nor about the Australian experiment on cloud passports. To be honest, although all the arguments that you provided in this post are valid, I do not believe that physical passports will disappear in the foreseeable future: while the costs and the efforts of such a large-scale operation will be enormous, both in the set up (think about collecting all the pieces of information from the different national registers, if they exist, and making them compatible with each other) and in the maintenance of this platform, the advantages seem to be quite limited. In fact, the only real drawback of physical passports is the fact that they can be lost. Moreover, I would also consider this from a more strategic perspective: what are the incentives that will convince countries to take part in such an expensive project? It is possible to estimate the cost of coordinating such a large number of stakeholders, namely airports, governments, and individuals? What are the risks involved (e.g. the ones connected to cyberattacks)? Is it feasible to run such a large data centre and to provide it with the required bandwidth to manage all the possible identification requests? As you can see, several questions still have to be answered, but in my opinion, this change is much more complex than it looks.
Hi Florita, great blog! I like the idea of a cloud-based passport. I think it will certainly help in the fight against false passports, which in turn can decrease the number of crimes as a result. The existence of false passports will be eradicated. Countries will have a much better overview of people entering their state. This is probably the most important argument for implementing digitized passports, although the security of this system must be the highest priority to prevent hackers from getting insight in the data.
However, a physical passport will still be needed. I don’t think that less developed countries will be able to implement such a system. Furthermore, the implementation of digitized passports on a worldwide scale seems very risky. The costs of a cloud-based passport will be immense, and the coordination between countries can be a big obstacle. Also important is which information will be stored in the cloud, and who can access these data. Can China for example view all my personal information, even though I’m not travelling to China? The technology looks very promising and I look forward to it, but it is important to carefully coordinate the process. Tung!