New canadian passports with electronic chip

April 20th 2012 - Bernard Prince

Passport Canada has announced that by the end of 2012, the new passports will be equipped with an electronic chip, much like credit cards or debit have since some years. Several countries already use this technology, including U.S., UK and France. So, this new device will incorporate a technology already used elsewhere.

If you look at your current passport, you can see that the last two lines already contain information that can be read by specialized machines. The chip will basically content the same information. How useful? This enhances security because the information is duplicated and the chip is very difficult to duplicate or defraud.

But more importantly, this chip will also contain your photo in electronic format. This will be essential if, in a more or less distant future, government agencies wanted to establish electronic systems for facial recognition, it would be possible with this new electronic document.

To learn more about the new passport, I suggest this video posted by the federal agency.