How a simple selfie could speed up travellers’ border crossings
LONG lines due to processing times at foreign airports and other border entry points are the big bugbear of any well-travelled executive.
You’re low-risk, you’ve been to the country many times for business, yet there’s a sense of deja vu every time you encounter an immigration or customs official.
One UK company believes it has the answer, and is keen to bring the process firmly into the 21st Century with some cutting-edge technology.
iProov believes you can have security without the stress — all thanks to your humble smartphone. “What our technology enables is self-service border checking,” iProov founder and CEO Andrew Bud told the Sunday Independent.
And the process of ‘iProoving’ is as simple as taking a camera-phone selfie.
“You are delivering up a two and a half second video of ourself which has been specially checked to genuinely prove you are yourself and not some synthetic video spoofery,” he says.
“You use your phone camera to scan something that identifies you — boarding card or passport or Global Traveller card then you’ll hold your phone up in a reasonably comfortable position to take a selfie and by the end of which you’ll get a return saying you’re clear for entry,” he says.
“The fundamental idea is to speed up the experience of travellers and reduce the routine workload on customs officials for checking good people.” The technology is aimed at low-risk travellers, with the facial authentication software cross-checking your image against your travel documents plus stored documents about who you are.
And Bud says it cuts out the paperwork for customs and border officials who “spend an awful amount of time checking the credentials of completely honest people”, even though they’ve already determined that you’re a low-risk case.
The technology is in demand, and earlier this year the US Department of Homeland’s Innovation Program in Silicon Valley awarded the company a contract to help improve country’s the passenger entry operation process. “We would hope to go into production within the next couple of years,” he says of the deal with the United States.
He also believes the company is a leader in stopping another major concern: identity fraud.
“The key thing in the future is going to be protecting against crooks who pretend to be honest people by presenting a synthetic video.
“We’re moving into a new world in which the next big cyber threat will be synthetic video. Already we’re seeing interviews with Barack Obama that never took place, we’re seeing speeches given by people who never spoke those words.”
And that’s just the start, he reckons: “We’re quite quickly going to see convincing video imagery that never happened.”
He cites the case of an app on his phone with which you can take a picture of someone — with or without their permission — and, by recording their movements and speech, you can ‘fake’ that person.
The result will be an animated image of the person, and “that’s what people will use to spoof and that’s really difficult to detect”, he adds.
It’s a nightmare scenario in any situation, not just an airport.
But what about ageing? We’ve all got passport pictures where we’ve got more hair, a little less weight, and a smaller number of wrinkles.
Bud argues that the face-matching technology is “remarkably good” at dealing with ageing, and it’s been tested using an 88-year-old man and the pension book he used decades before.
The technology’s verdict was that he was indeed the same man.
Surprisingly, the biggest facial changes occur in adolescence, he reveals, with the technology able to differentiate between a 14 or 15-year-old subject and one in his or her twenties, when major changes occur. The good news for regular travellers is that they’ll be first in line to use such technology, given their trusted status, with Bud seeing faster throughput of such passengers at destination airports.
It could be argued that iProoving could be a solution to any future cross-border checks here of importers and exporters, without the need for customs agents.
The company is not involved in the Brexit area, but Bud says the technology works well “for helping low-risk travellers to cross borders — even where there is no border control stop — in a way that ensures they comply with border controls straddling two different jurisdictions.
For now, Bud, who has worked here in the past on a major project for Cadbury’s in Dublin, sees Ireland as a “very interesting market”, with the technology already working with major banks for ID verification regarding accounts or card purchases. ING bank in the Netherlands recently launched an app which enables customers to open an account independently on their mobile phone without having to enter a branch.