Last year, 38,718 Australian passports were reported to have been stolen or be missing, up from 38,689 the previous year.
There aren't any formal proposals on the table yet, but Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is keen on the idea, which came out of an innovation challenge run by her department.
The government plans to spend $18.5 million (US$13m) on a system called the Capability - short for The National Facial Biometric Matching Capability - which is due to be operational from mid next year.
Australia's government agencies already store every traveller's border crossing details electronically, including information such as passport numbers, dates of travel and the contents of handwritten incoming and outgoing passenger cards, which are scanned and later saved digitally.
Australia and New Zealand are in discussion about trialling a "cloud" passport meaning travellers would no longer need to carry it with them.
The cloud-based passport would be kept online and then downloaded or accessed by customs agents across the globe as required.
The top 10 were presented to the quartet of judges who favoured the idea of passport-less travel.
New Zealand could trial passport-less travel in a world-first move. Australia has signalled that it might be time to leave the humble passport behind, however, with a new passport-free travel trial it's calling Cloud Passport.
Bishop acknowledged there were security requirements which would have to be met in order to store biometrics in the cloud, but told Fairfax Media: "We think it will go global".
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Michael Mitchell
Quelle/Source: Financial Spots, 31.10.2015
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
