A recent EU meeting discussed personal biometric data on passports, however disagreement still exists as to which technology will be integrated. Time is running out before the freedom to travel to the US will be curtailed for many European travelers.
A recent European Union meeting demanded a coherent approach on biometric identifiers or biometric data that are to be included on future passports.
Various biometric technologies are being studied and initially included iris scanning, which has since been discarded, as it is a proprietary technology.
Facial recognition together with fingerprint technology are still being considered. Regardless of the technology chosen, the new passports will need to have the storage capacity to hold the data. That is because it would be impractical to build a database large enough to store data of the whole population.
A high-density barcode like PDF417 is becoming more popular for encoding large amounts of data on machine readable ID cards. Symbol Technologies term their PDF417 technology, the New Symbol of Data Management and it might be the chosen medium to store data on the passport pages, but so might also a chip.
Some countries, like the UK are not however planning to implement the new technology into passports until 2006. Whether they can hold that deadline will probably depend how long it takes to come to an agreement.
Meanwhile, a way must be found to grant those people without a valid Visa the freedom to travel to the USA after October 2004 as mentioned in my recent report: Most Europeans banned from entry to the USA after October 2004. That is the US deadline for entry to the USA without a Visa or biometric identifier on your passport.
European and US politicians are hoping to lead the world with biometric passports and say that non-cooperation can make worldwide travel more difficult.
Questions that remain unanswered are:
- If the technology fails at any time, will the traveller find that his freedom to travel is stopped dead?
- How will a replacement be issued if a high tech passport is lost in a remote place?
