Electronic passport to the future
'INSERT your thumb and your card please.' As rude as this may sound, it will be a phrase coming to an immigration control point near you.
Gone will be the days of filling your passport with colourful stamps from around the globe; instead, Hong Kong travellers will have an electronic identity known only to Immigration Department databases.
Immigration officials have already reached the stage of asking smart card producers to come up with proposals for an electronic passport.
A similar programme is under way in the United States - but do not throw away your passport or identity card just yet.
An Immigration Department spokesman said experts from the department's Information Systems Branch expected the results of their study within the next few months, but an electronic system of smart cards and thumb-print processing through immigration control points could still be 10 years away.
With about 100,000 people passing through the Lowu border checkpoint each day, smart cards would fast-track processing and cut staff by up to 80 per cent.
The spokesman said it was envisaged travellers would enter a turnstile where they would slide their smart card through a scanner while placing their thumb, finger or palm over a scanner which would verify it against the card.
It is understood one immigration officer could oversee at least five turnstiles and that processing could be carried out in a few seconds with the time and point of entry registering with a central computer.
'The priorities we have to look at are the costs of implementation, security features of smart cards and their durability,' the immigration spokesman said.
'It would be no good if you could only use these smart cards twice and then had to throw them away or if they could be cloned.' He said Hong Kong was looking at the available technology for immigration applications in a way that no other nation was doing.
'We want to lead the way and make sure we are ahead of the game on implementing technology that will take us through to a phase that is beyond passports as we now know them.' The spokesman said an ever-increasing workload for the understaffed Immigration Department meant that smart cards, although high in implementation costs, would probably result in long-term personnel cost savings.
