Officials said they think the biometric checks, which match facial scans with stored electronic images, could “do a better job” than border security officials and help to ease congestion during busy periods.
“We are planning a trial of facial recognition gates to see if they deliver our requirements,” said Gary Murphy, head of operational design and development for the UK Border Agency.
“We think a machine can do a better job.”
However, he admitted the plan could cause concern among employees, and questioned whether they would see it as a threat to their jobs or an opportunity for more interesting work.
“We want to divert their work to areas where their skills can best be used,” he added.
According to The Guardian, unmanned ‘fast track’ lanes will be phased in gradually, with an initial pilot scheme open to UK and EU citizens with modern biometric passports.
However, the paper said the system will err on the side of caution in order to prevent people on police watch lists skipping the border. If so, innocent passengers could be unnecessarily rejected and redirected into conventional queues.
Roll out
Ministers have yet to decide how many airports will take part, but if the scheme proves a success the technology will be rolled out to all British airports.
Home Office minister Liam Byrne said, “Britain’s border security is now among the toughest in the world and tougher checks do take time, but we don’t want long waits.
“So the UK Border Agency will soon be testing new automatic gates for British and European Economic Area citizens. We will test them this year and if they work put them at all key ports.”
The latest checks are apparently part of a plan to help the government establish a comprehensive advance passenger information (API) security system that will eventually allow flight details and identities of all passengers to be checked against a security watch list.
But Gus Hosein, a civil liberties expert at the London School of Economics told The Guardian facial recognition technology was “laughable”.
He said, “US police at the SuperBowl had to turn it off within three days because it was throwing up so many false positives. The computer couldn’t even recognise gender. It’s not that it could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but that it won’t match them with their image”.
He added, “A human can make assumptions, a computer can’t”.
