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"Thailand continues to embrace advanced technology, announcing that five smaller upcountry airports will pilot a facial recognition system to reduce lines, speed immigration procedures, and increase safety. Should the pilot project prove successful, it would be scaled up nationwide. "Currently, travelers may be required to show their ID cards or passports up to three times in one trip through an airport," said Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam."

"Thailand continues to embrace advanced technology, announcing that five smaller upcountry airports will pilot a facial recognition system to reduce lines, speed immigration procedures, and increase safety. Should the pilot project prove successful, it would be scaled up nationwide. "Currently, travelers may be required to show their ID cards or passports up to three times in one trip through an airport," said Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam. Officials expect the new system will eliminate the need for immigration police officers to inspect passports. As the number of tourists and business travelers has been steadily increasing over the years, immigration lines at Thailand's major airports have grown longer, causing inconvenience to visitors and inspiring some complaints. The new system will also benefit Thais, as they must also present national identification cards at airports under the current system. Under the new system, travelers "can have their faces scanned just once at check-in counters and then board a plane without the need to show their ID cards, passports or boarding passes," Thaworn said. The five airports that will participate in the pilot project are Krabi and Surat Thani airports in the South, and Udon Thani, Ubon Ratchathani, and Khon Kaen airports in the Northeast. Not all aspects of the system have been ironed out. A panel is being formed to study the new identification system with representatives from the Department of Airports, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Royal Thai Police. They plan to work out synchronize their databases, which store information on Thai and foreign travelers."

"The Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) - which collaborated with ICA to roll out the scanning system - said in a statement that iris patterns have a higher degree of variation and uniqueness as compared to fingerprints, and are therefore "more robust and reliable.""

"Journalists discovered that two companies had posted the personal data of 170,000 customers online. The leak, which exposed the victims to identity theft and fraud, was reportedly so bad that social security numbers, passport scans, financial data and home addresses were indexed by search engines. Rather than merely address the problem, however, TerraCom and YourTel threatened the reporters, referring to them as "hackers" and accusing them of "numerous violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act"

"While Keenan emphasised the capability was not a centralised biometric database, and was simply an improved way to share information already collected by different Australian jurisdictions, Gregory questioned how these images of Australians will be employed by law enforcement. "It's subtle changes in the way that things are used that need to be debated the most," he said. "In this case, we're talking about using our passport photos for a purpose for which we never gave permission.""

"Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become "commonplace" in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches."