Gone are the days of worrying if you remembered to pack your passport (not to mention having to guard it with your passport with your life while you travel).
A company is currently looking into a technology that could make carrying a physical passport all together obsolete.
De La Rue, a passport manufacturer and producer of banknotes, is developing a new smart-passport technology that would allow travellers to store their passports on their smartphones similar to mobile boarding passes. This would allow passengers to pass seamlessly through airports without any paper documentation.
De La Rue chief executive Martin Sutherland told the Times that the company is currently in the early stages of testing out the paperless passport concept.
Currently, passport technology involves each document contains a chip that helps identify the traveller. So in order to get them to successfully work on smartphones, and to ensure there’re no counterfeit passports being used, digital passports will require new hardware on the device in order to securely store the electronic passport so it cannot be copied from the phone.
The passport will also have to be communicated wirelessly to passport readers, as doing it onscreen, like an airline ticket QR code (two-dimensional barcode), can be spoofed.
While this sounds like a great concept, especially for someone who has lost their passport while travelling, the company needs to take into consideration what might happen if a traveller lost their phone while on vacation, something millennials aren’t not all together unlikely to do…