Spanish carrier Iberia trials facial recognition system
Last Friday I attended the launch of Spanish airline Iberia’s facial recognition system for access to gates and boarding itself, a service that is being trialed on the Madrid-Barcelona Air Shuttle.
Facial recognition is already common in many airports: I have used Dubai’s Smart Gates for many years now, and it provides comfort and convenience to passengers in airport transit. In this case, it will be in exchange for allowing Spain’s AENA airports authority to take custody of your biometric data. According to the terms of service, this will be restricted to verifying passengers’ identity while in the airport and in boarding.
The process is relatively simple, and can be started from the Iberia app, on the user’s profile icon in the upper right corner, and then scrolling down the menu that appears until you find the penultimate option, “Facial recognition”. After accepting the terms of service, the user has to scan the back of their identity card, read the RFID chip on it (the most difficult part of the process, which requires moving the document around the back of the phone until the sensor is able to read it), and take a selfie. At the moment, it can only be carried out on iPhones, and will be available for Android later.
From there, the user will have to associate their boarding pass with biometric…
