There’s a lot of fuss about travellers fingerprints being taken at the new Terminal 5, which worried me a bit as well, until I discovered the reason for it. The proposed system would take a fingerprint at check-in and compare it to one at boarding to make sure the same person was getting on the flight, like an electronic boarding card.
Somehow it got mixed up with keeping peoples fingerprints on file somewhere, when in fact they promised to destroy the data after 24 hours (assuming they can be believed). However this confusion could have been avoided if they just used the fingerprint as a numeric hash and checked that. That way no fingerprint data would ever be stored but there would be a unique hash that would ensure the passenger hadn’t changed before boarding.
