Face-recognition at 3 airports
New Delhi, December 1
Passenger data shared for DigiYatra would be saved in an encrypted format in a decentralised manner, Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said here today.
Scindia was speaking at IGI Airport after launching DigiYatra, a facial recognition technology for air passengers. Besides Delhi, the facility was today simultaneously introduced for Bengaluru and Varanasi airports.
DigiYatra will be launched at four more airports, Hyderabad, Pune, Vijayawada and Kolkata, by March next year. It would later be rolled out at other airports, said Scindia. It will be available for willing passengers taking domestic flights. In Delhi, DigiYatra will be available for passengers taking domestic flights from Terminal 3 (T3).
To use the facility, one-time registration on DigiYatra app is required using Aadhaar-based validation and a self-image capture. The project has tremendous advantages of improving passenger convenience and ease of travel, Scindia said.
The minister said that keeping in mind privacy issues, there was no central storage of personally identifiable information (PII). A passenger’s ID and travel credentials are stored in a secure wallet in the passenger’s smartphone itself. The uploaded data will utilise blockchain technology and all the data will be purged from the servers within 24 hours of use. With DigiYatra, India will now stand in the ranks of world-class airports, said Scindia.
