COMING TO TERMS WITH TRAVELLING AGAIN
COMING TO TERMS WITH TRAVELLING AGAIN
It might be the announcement of Joe Biden lifting the travel ban on European tourists after 18 months, or the growing number of events and trade conferences going back to in-person, but truth is that I have been thinking lately about going back to travelling.
Since the pandemic started, we have seen the massive shift to digital and touchless reaching from airport curbside to hotel check-in. Even with more and more travellers being fully vaccinated and strict cleaning protocols in place, exchanging travel documents and touching surfaces through check-in, security, border control, and boarding still pose some risks in terms of infection for passengers and staff alike.
From an identity perspective, if biometrics were already widely accepted before the pandemic, I believe their use will become more widespread. From contactless fingerprints, iris and face recognition to touchless document scanning and voice commands, all are secure and frictionless identity verification methods either already well established or being tested.
At the same time, efforts to develop and apply digital health protocols and standards keep spreading worldwide. The World Economic Forum’s Known Traveller Digital Identity initiative is a good example. This initiative’s partners (from governments to travellers or airlines) can access verifiable claims of a traveller’s identity data to improve passenger processing and reduce risk. Travellers can manage their own profile, collect digital ‘attestations’ of their identity data and decide which information to share. For example, in the current situation, travellers would be able to securely obtain and store trusted, verifiable health credentials such as immunizations records or negative covid-19 test results in their digital identity wallets. Those would be combined with other trusted, verifiable identity data from public or private entities. To make the whole experience smoother and still secure, people could consent to sharing their identity and health data in advance of the journey, allowing border officials to conduct any required risk assessments in advance, instead of at the airport.
Inevitably, concerns and debates around these changes have also arisen. Something similar occurred twenty years ago, when the tragic events of 9/11 marked a before and after for everyone, affecting virtually every aspect of our daily lives, from the way we travel to how we get our identity documents. For example, following the 9/11 Commision’s recommendation for state-issued driving licences and birth certificates, the U.S. Congress passed the Real ID Act in 2005. This federal law set security standards for licences and mandated that every driving licence must be linked to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records. That decision created one of the many controversies the country has seen in regards to the potential creation of a national ID but also boosted the standardisation of both IDs and identity management schemes. These security benchmarks and industry standards have been adopted by governments and all sorts of organisations globally, not just in the U.S, leading to the enhanced security features present in the passports, driving licences and national identity cards we use today. It will be finally in 2021, two decades after the tragic attacks in New York and Washington DC that the TSA will begin enforcing the Real ID requirement.
Since its creation in 2001, barely months after 9/11, the U.S. Transport Security Association (TSA) has become one of the main drivers of identity verification programmes worldwide. Think of its PreCheck system, for example. It currently has over 10 million people registered and aims to raise that to 25 million, so TSA officers spend more time on passengers considered a bigger risk while private identity verification providers (currently Idemia, Telos and Clear) focus on the other travellers. Thanks to TSA efforts, we all have grown accustomed to using kiosks equipped with facial recognition technology to check photo IDs and boarding passes or to have our fingerprints read at security controls located at airports around the world.
It seems unlikely all these changes will go anytime soon. We’ll probably see more of the change of direction that started some years ago; that’s it maintaining security but with less friction. I’m especially interested in seeing how this will ‘translate’ into remote identity verification and authentication. Using biometrics in that context seem very similar but the risks to the individual are very different. Look out for some more thoughts on this in my next blog.
Photo credits: Delta News Hub, Flikr
