The tech revolution in the travel world, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, is at once marvelous and invasive of your privacy. Apps, facial recognition, and smart products can make air transit and border crossings more convenient. Their touch-free and skip-the-line elements may help keep you safer from illness-causing viruses.New tech may also speed up the return to normal travel, like the the World Economic Forum and The Commons Project collaboration CommonPass initiative, which aims to allow governments to validate individuals’ COVID testing and, eventually, vaccination credentials.But such innovation comes with some risks. For a cautionary tale about travel technology and data security, look no further than a recent episode involving former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who posted a photo of his Qantas Airlines boarding pass on his Instagram account, only to see a hacker scan the coding and obtain the ex-PM’s passport number.Paper tickets are old school. But they illustrate that cyber sneaks are eager to use their HTML-scanning, database-mining skills for good—or ill. In Abbott’s case, the hacker exposed security flaws in a ploy to discourage people from flaunting their boarding passes and other sensitive documents online. The airline responded by upgrading security protocols.When you head back out into a world of new travel technology, how can you protect your personal information?Facial recognition techSingapore, always ahead of the tech curve, announced it will be the first country in the world to use facial recognition on government-issued IDs, starting in September 2020. By 2023, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security expects to be using facial recognition on 97 percent of travelers.(Related: Will facial recognition technology invade your privacy? The answer is complex.)The COVID-19 pandemic has created new technology, too—and concerns about its ramifications. In some countries, visitors must download contact-tracing apps (Belize) or wear a GPS tracker (during quarantine in Hong Kong and for some travelers to Grenada). For the time being, tracking and tracing may be the price of traveling during a viral outbreak. The most secure contact-tracing apps use Bluetooth and don’t auto-upload info to a central database. But in June, Amnesty International called out Bahrain, Kuwait, and Norway for overly invasive apps and Qatar for a security flaw that made personal info vulnerable to hackers.
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