India Introduces Facial Recognition as Boarding Pass
Anyone who has travelled to India in the last couple of years will have noticed a new identification system at country’s major airports that is called DigiYatra. ‘Yatra’ is Hindi for wandering or travelling, and the idea is to replace the traditional paper boarding pass with facial recognition when travelling by air. The advantages are said to be speed and convenience. To use it, you will need to download an app to your phone and upload your biometric data through that prior to travel. According to the promoters of the system, this is “the future of air travel”.
To better understand the concept, it is worth explaining the usual process of travel at India’s (major) airports today. In order to enter an airport building, one needs to first present a travel document and a ticket at the door. This is the first check. Then one will proceed to get a printed boarding pass from a counter and check in one’s luggage if needed. At the security checkpoint, one has to pass through a security gate, but despite the gate, everyone will still be searched individually as well, after which the officer will stamp the boarding pass as eligible. Only then can one proceed to the departure gate, where the boarding pass and document will be checked again, to allow the traveller to proceed to the aircraft, where, however, the boarding pass and travel document will be checked once more at the door – as if there was some mystic way of infiltrating the closed corridor between the departure gate and the aircraft itself. In other words, there are essentially four checks between arriving at the airport and boarding the plane. The new system would supposedly help to make this easier.
However, the system has received notable criticism: according to one survey, in about a third of the cases, people’s data was added to the system without their own knowledge of the process – i.e. by the initiative of the airport staff who failed to explain its reasons to the passengers. A further 15% of users have claimed that they only joined the programme because they could no longer find a regular entry gate. The Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian digital rights NGO, has also raised the issue of compromised privacy for users of the system and the lack of institutional accountability and transparency. It should be noted that the system was set up by a private company and is still owned by an NGO, with the government-owned Airports Authority of India holding just over a quarter of the company. The law of India thus exempts the consortium, as a private enterprise, from any obligation to comply with the Right to Information Requests made to them, and hence reveal the exact use of the data.
Justifying the new system with speed and convenience feels a bit thin as an argument as well – logically taken, the system can only be faster if it isn’t for everybody, for else the exact same number of people would need to pass through the face check as would otherwise pass through the regular check, and the former isn’t any faster by itself than an officer glancing at one’s travel document for a moment. A separate question is whether such repetitive checks at the airports, as is the practice in India, is really necessary, and whether this could be made more efficient – hard to tell exactly the purpose of a security gate if everyone is searched individually anyhow, for example. For it is really this that currently slows down the process more than anything else.
But maybe the posters are right and this is the ‘future of air travel’, whereby one can no longer board a plane at one point without being biometrically identified? In only a couple of short decades, India has turned a rather traditional and closed society into one of the forerunners of social digital revolution, it seems. However, thinking of such future, one cannot help but be reminded of Steven Spielberg’s famous movie Minority Report, in which an automated system in a shop greeted all the entrants by name, based on facial recognition, and it was this that granted them certain rights, etc. But we will see.
Another major change in India in recent years has been the marked decline of cash. Whereas a couple of decades ago, card payments where available only at select places, especially outside of bigger cities, and the day-to-day economy ran almost solely on cash, today the cash payments can often be problematic unless you have the exact amount. And yet even the most remote and smallest tea kiosk, let alone any upscale establishment, will offer mobile payment via barcode. The big turning point in this was probably the autumn of 2016, when the Indian government cancelled the existing 500-rupee and 1000-rupee notes literally overnight (worth around €5 and €10 respectively, i.e. the two most circulating notes in the country), and for a while there was widespread chaos and shortage of cash, as exchanging the old notes for the new ones was slow and caused queues for many hours, having people leave sometimes still empty-handed. It is also to be noted the spread of mobile phones, and now smartphones, has been quite unprecendented in the country.
Originally posted here: https://www.freedom-research.org/p/india-introduces-facial-recognition
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