Aviation: Don't change your hairstyle when you are travelling
London Heathrow's T5 is to adopt facial recognition technology to speed up passenger flows through immigration.
The concept is simple: facial recognition "maps" your face as you approach the desk. Then the data thus obtained will be compared to the biometric data held in the latest passports.
So far, so good.
But there is always one person who says "what can I do to break it?"
The answer, one security expert told us on condition of anonymity is disarmingly simple.
"Brush your parting to the wrong side of your head," he told us.
Facial recognition has been used to identify criminals in the UK for more than a decade. Cameras scan the crowd at soccer matches and cross-refer to data held by what used to be the anti-soccer hooliganism section of the National Criminal Intelligence Service. Cameras at roadside checkpoints look out for known terrorists.
"Another way that terrorists have used is to brush their hair the wrong way, take a photo, reverse the image and in that way the parting in the passport photo is on the correct side of the head so they pass visual inspection but as faces do not have perfect symmetry the differences are such that the machines don't flag them against watch lists."
So the Heathrow approach is different. It is not looking for positive matches against watch lists. it is looking for discrepancies between the mapped image and the biometric data. And if there is a discrepancy, you will be pulled out of the queue and questioned.
It's going to be a test - at present it is not clear whether any gates other than those at T5 will be disclosed.
The Home Office has not said exactly what system it will use: but it has, it seems, decided against the thumbprints used in Malaysia and the Iris scanning used in the Netherlands as a means of providing a fast-track for registered travellers.
Quite how it will detect a legitimate visit to the hairdressers has not been disclosed.
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