Apple Patent Suggests iPhone Could Double Up As E-Passport

These days it’s safe to assume that the majority of passports issued by governments around the world are of the e-passport variety, meaning that they come with chips embedded in them that when scanned, will pull up information about the owner of the passport, like photo, name, country of birth, and etc.

Now we know that Apple wants to turn your iPhone into a digital wallet of sorts, allowing you to store membership and loyalty cards, as well as credit/debit cards, which is why it doesn’t really come as a complete surprise to learn that Apple is also interested in turning the iPhone and the Apple Watch into an e-passport, or at least that’s according to a recently discovered patent.

The patent basically describes a system in which the iPhone or the Apple Watch could contain the same technology found in an e-passport, meaning that at immigration, all users have to do is scan their phones or Apple Watch and it should be able to bring up the same information that one might expect from an e-passport.

The patent description reads (in part), “In some embodiments, the identification document is a passport that includes a radio-frequency identification (RFID) circuit storing the credential information, and the request specifies a passport number read from the RFID circuit.” However with this being a patent, it’s hard to tell if there are plans to make it a reality, not to mention we’d expect there’d be a ton of legal and regulatory hurdles to clear, but it’s an interesting idea all the same, don’t you think?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: iPhone, Patent