The future will be arriving at airports in the UK later this year, as trials are set to allow travellers to pass through border control without a passport. Machines will instead scan individuals’ faces and use facial recognition to access their information on an existing database.
The technology is already in use overseas, with Dubai championing the new age of air travel security. If its UK trial with a limited number of passengers goes well, the Home Office will have almost 300 e-gates to replace in the coming years. Phil Douglas, director general of the UK Border Force, hopes the move will render legacy passport gates a thing of the past.
To use the gates, people will need to be registered ahead of time, which the government has begun preparing for with its Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) scheme. ETA will see UK and Irish citizens’ data information automatically uploaded to an app, thereby helping to avoid queues at the border.
If that all sounds a bit ‘Black Mirror’-y, don’t worry – it’s not too different to the system in place at the moment and will likely make travel much more seamless. Officials also claim this will increase security, with Douglas saying ‘we will know a lot more information about people upfront… we’ll know if there’s any records of them on our security systems.’
Some have voiced concerns about the potential pitfalls of relying too heavily on the new systems, after an IT problem in May 2023 caused the entire e-gate system in the UK to crash and caused hours of delays. Despite this, the Home Office is confident in the tech.
Hopefully, this could make the air travel experience less of a nightmare, at least until the robots take over completely and we all succumb to the inevitable AI-topia.
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