April 17th - Careful with that tech when you are on your airport journey
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many travellers have welcomed speculation that facial recognition combined with digital passports could allow smoother journeys through the airport. But as I have been hearing from tech writer and broadcaster, Kate Bevan, the concept raises serious concerns – from digital exclusion to privacy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Thursday the 17th of April. |
| 0:05.4 | It may well have seen in the past week all kinds of reports saying how marvelous it's going |
| 0:11.1 | to be to be a traveler of the future. You will be able to breeze through an airport just smiling |
| 0:17.1 | your way through at all the cameras. They will know who you are. You'll have your |
| 0:21.4 | digital passport on your smartphone and it will all be really just a very straightforward |
| 0:27.3 | journey. I know because I've spoken and heard from a lot of travellers who say, well, |
| 0:32.7 | this is great. Where do I sign up? Can't come quickly enough. But one person who has very significant concerns about |
| 0:39.3 | this is the writer and tech expert Kate Bevan, whose work you will probably have read. |
| 0:46.0 | She specialises in the intersection between tech and our normal lives. Welcome, Kate. Thank you for |
| 0:53.1 | joining us. I'm afraid I'm slightly in the camp of |
| 0:56.8 | the worst part of any journey is going through the airport. I'll do whatever it takes in order |
| 1:02.0 | to have a slightly easier time. Yeah, I hear you on that. And actually, tech has already made |
| 1:08.5 | it quite a lot easier. I mean, you know, a lot of places now you can fill in your landing cards in advance. Like if you go to Singapore, you fill it in online and you can breeze to arrivals at Changi, which is an amazing airport. You know, things like that have made travel a lot easier. But tech is quite complicated. Underneath the apparently seamless interface, it's a lot going on under the hood. |
| 1:29.3 | And I know this because some of the airline tech, the airline booking tech, was written in |
| 1:33.1 | the 60s by my dad. And it's still in systems like Hamidaeus. So there's a lot of work to |
| 1:39.2 | bring all this stuff together and working together. And I think many of us also have had |
| 1:43.2 | the experience of, |
| 1:47.7 | you know, there's an airline app where, for example, if you're a dual national, you can't have two passports in there. So there's lots of friction. And the new technology that's |
| 1:52.0 | being talked about on top of this is potentially amazing, but there's lots of issues with it. |
| 1:57.0 | One of them is that AI is transformative in lots and lots of ways, but also is a long |
| 2:02.6 | way from perfect. The Met did a trial with AI facial recognition tech a little while back |
| 2:08.5 | and had to discontinue it because it was so unreliable. It's particularly bad at identifying |
... |
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