July 7, 2005

Lufthansa Tests Biometric Tickets

by Dhiram Shah

The German airline Lufthansa has started testing tickets encoded with passengers’ thumbprint data in hopes of speeding up check-ins without compromising security. Passengers would get tickets encoded with their thumbprint data, then check themselves in by placing their thumbs on a machine. Frequent fliers would have their thumbprint data encoded on their frequent flier cards instead of their tickets. The German government is also starting to make use of biometric data in travel documents and will start issuing passports embedded with facial data in November. A fingerprint will be added in March 2007.