The Seamless Surveillance Machine: Europe’s Biometric Border Vision

Imagine that you’re about to cross the border into the European Union. You’re driving at around 20 km/h, and the checkpoint is still some 200 meters away, but algorithms and AI are already at work to identify you — as well as your family — as you sit in the car. Regardless of whether it’s day or night, whether it’s a beautiful sunny day or pouring rain, you won’t need to stop. Every single passenger is instantly identified and cross-checked against multiple databases — and your social media feeds, online posts and even forays into the “dark web” — to determine whether you are deemed entitled to enter the EU.

Are you crossing on foot instead? It makes no difference. Automated behavioral analysis is deployed against you as multiple biometric recognition technologies flag “movements of the body that could be a sign of nervousness” and appear “suspicious”, while your iris is scanned by border agents who are still six meters away. If needed, they will dig deeper as you get closer: thanks to “Contactless Friction Ridge Recognition”, your hand shape, fingerprints, palms, knuckles, and vascular patterns will disclose whether you are a potential terrorist or just another traveler eager to spend both their money and time in beautiful Europe — all in an instant.

This is not yet reality — but it soon will be. Or at least, that is what the EU has been actively promoting and funding with hundreds of millions of euros for almost two decades, through research projects that have readily adopted the travel and security industry’s vision for “seamless travel”. This vision is grounded in what they dubbed “biometrics on the move” technologies. From the seminal ABC4EU, which laid the building blocks for the recently launched Entry/Exit System (EES), to the most recent EINSTEIN, SafeTravellers, PopEye, CarMen and AutoBorder Horizon projects, the direction is clear: “The future of identity is biometrics!”

Scanned in silence by AI

No more passports, or indeed any other physical documents — all you need is your smartphone. Ultimately, the promise is that every body and its behavior will be scanned and processed at EU borders. For travelers classified as “low-risk” by AI-based assessments, controls will be entirely automated, instantaneous, and largely invisible. For the others, human officers will intervene and perform thorough checks. Simple. Efficient. Smart. Right?

Bugs and glitches? Don’t worry — EU-funded AI will come to the rescue

On October 12, 2025, the EES began replacing traditional passport stamping with biometric records at EU borders. Gradually, but inevitably, your face and fingerprints will be ingested into a digital border management system that fundamentally relies on interoperable databases and automation, provided you are a “non-EU national”.

The technology to ‘seamlessly’ do so, however, has yet to materialize. Currently, the EES rollout — despite repeated delays (it was first announced in 2017) and only partial implementation — is being plagued by glitches, bugs, and inadequately trained border authorities, resulting in precisely the long queues the system was meant to eliminate, from Frankfurt and Munich airports to the port of Dover.

These problems were foreseen long ago. And that’s where research into “biometrics on the move” technologies enters the picture. The proponents promise to allow “the acquisition of biometric data at a distance for the purpose of identity verification”, contactless and without requiring a traveler's cooperation.

Iris patterns, facial images, palm prints, gait and hand vein pattern recognition were already central components of a seminal biometrics project funded by the British multinational BAE Systems in 2010, hailed at the time as “visionary” and targeted — back then — at “military access solutions”. A year later, the EU-funded BIO-DISTANCE project described “biometrics on the move” the “hottest research topic” and delivered an early legacy solution that has since been taken up, refined and extended by several subsequent Horizon projects.

Then, around 2017, Frontex began to display a growing and systematic interest in biometrics on the move technologies, hosting industry-oriented events on the topic. They were envisioned as a way to enroll asylum seekers in a “pre-travel ID notification” scheme from the very outset.

The phantom evidence: EU invests millions based on results it won't release

The deep ties with the security industry, extensively documented in the ‘Frontex Files’, culminated in a seminal pilot at the Lisbon airport two years later — a turning point whose outcomes apparently justified funneling millions of euros into further developing biometric capabilities for EU border checks.

Six years after the pilot’s completion, we sought access to the results — but to no avail. Other researchers have met the same fate in the past, when Frontex claimed to hold “no documents” detailing them. Unlike previous access-to-document requests, however, we approached Frontex via a freedom of information request for a specific trial report that, according to the pilot’s tender, should have been submitted to Frontex by the contractor, the Portuguese company Vision-Box. The company, recently acquired by the global travel industry giant Amadeus, has long been instrumental in developing several “biometrics on the move”-related technologies in Europe, including for the EES, and participated in several Horizon consortia.

And yet, Frontex reiterated the very same denial, arguing that “it does not hold such documents”. Does this mean that the contractor failed to deliver the required report on the trial’s results? We posed this question to Frontex in a “confirmatory application”, but the agency — after “a thorough search through the available search tools” — could only confirm that “the document in question is not in Frontex’s possession”, adding that “no final report was formally approved”. Nonetheless, Frontex also claims that the results of the Lisbon pilot were, of course, successful and formed the basis for the “tender documentation of the subsequent EES Pilot Project”. We, however, could find no explicit reference to the Lisbon pilot within it.

We could not determine whether this implies that some other EU institution holds the document or that Vision-Box failed to submit it instead, as the company only responded to our inquiries by stating that “Any questions on this should be directed to Frontex”. But again, the agency maintained that it “cannot provide an answer”, as “the public’s right of access to the documents of the institutions covers only documents and not information in the wider meaning of the word and does not imply a duty for the institutions to reply to any request for information from an individual”.

Upon taking office in 2023, the current Head of the agency, Hans Leijtens, made a solemn pledge: “We are going to restore trust by being very transparent about what we are doing and how we are doing it”. Two years later, that promise still rings hollow.

The hidden cost of on-the-move border controls

Regardless, we already know enough about biometrics-on-the-move-technologies to reveal a darker side to the EU’s utopia of fully automated border controls.

First of all, the tech is far from ready, and likely will remain so for quite some time. “When we talk about biometrics on the move, we’re talking about tools that are still in an embryonic stage”, Caterina Bove, a lawyer working at the Italian network of migration law experts ASGI, told AlgorithmWatch in a video interview. “The impression is that, from a practical standpoint, we are still very far from the use of biometrics-on-the-move tools, and that police officers themselves are absolutely unprepared to use them or even understand them in any case”, added her colleague, Matteo Astuti.

A 2022 ‘Technology Roadmap’ of biometrics in border control by the Center for Identification Technology Research corroborates this assessment, arguing that such biometrics applications must be considered a “mid-term” technology, likely ready for actual use only in six to fifteen years. Noting that they have so far only been validated in research environments and “not evaluated under operational conditions”.

How can EU institutions be sure that these technologies will actually work — and respect human rights?

Frontex itself appears more cautious in its ‘technology foresight’ reports. Its 2022 report on the “future of travel”, for example, explicitly notes that foundational components of biometrics-on-the-move such as gait and periocular recognition — central to EU-funded projects like CarMen — are still in their infancy, and therefore too flawed or immature for deployment, so much so that “their future impact on the sector is impossible to determine based on the data”. The vision, in other words, rests on little solid scientific evidence.

But even if research projects could eventually produce it, significant legal challenges remain — an aspect tacitly ignored in the Frontex foresight report, argues University of Zagreb researcher Matija Kontak in ‘Biometric Borders Envisaged by Frontex: Fundamental Rights in the Backseat’ (2024). “The agency”, he writes, actually “failed to provide a legal assessment on whether these technologies could infringe rights. Instead, it simply acknowledges that there are 'risks'”.

Frontex could have consulted an official EU-funded study — but didn't

Frontex could have referred to one of the official documents produced by the EU-funded PROTECT project in 2018 when seeking guidance. Their conclusion? Under the current legal framework, biometrics-on-the-move technologies would most likely be illegal.

Firstly, consortium members wrote in deliverable D2.5, “It is very unlikely that inclusion of additional multimodal biometric features (being not facial image or fingerprints) developed within the PROTECT project could legally be integrated in ePassports”. Secondly, “smartphones cannot be considered as ‘passports or travel documents’” under current EU law. The authors even go so far as to suggest that “substantial work” will be needed to reconcile these technologies with existing legal standards.

Contacted by AlgorithmWatch, Kontak further explained in a written response that border agents lament that biometric technologies currently still require the subject to “face the camera frontally, with good lighting” — a major obstacle for on-the-move identification.

Also, even a seemingly negligible lack of accuracy could produce disastrous aggregate results when human mobility is concerned: “What particularly compounds the problem is that there are millions of persons crossing EU borders and that will be affected by EES, or by other biometric systems of the EU, including VIS, SIS, ECRIS TCN and of course, EURODAC”, he wrote in an email exchange. “Even a small rate of errors on millions of persons gets compounded so that many thousands of persons would have an unpleasant experience”.

Lastly, it is more than likely that automating border controls will only reinforce and normalize well-documented “analogue” discriminatory practices. “Technologies such as those developed for implementing forms of biometrics on the move can certainly lead to further practices of racial profiling”, Astuti told AlgorithmWatch. “Profiling will become one of the key elements, and as the technology becomes more refined over time, the phenomenon will only become more widespread.”

If the border follows you everywhere, have borders disappeared – or become inescapable?

Notwithstanding their opacity, immaturity and the systemic challenges they pose to human rights, these technologies are increasingly being developed and piloted across the globe — from Singapore to Canada, from Dubai to the US.

The industry even claims to have already solved the biometrics-based, frictionless border-crossing experience. Paravision, for example, asserted in the August 2025 edition of ‘Border Management Today’ that with its Contactless Corridor V3 “the border checkpoint is no longer a stop. It’s a moment of movement: observed, understood, and verified invisibly in real time”.

You will no longer travel: you will be “exporting the border”, argues the company. It is “movement” that “defines the checkpoint — not the other way around”, wrote Carl Gohringer, Paravision’s Vice President of Global Public Sector Business Development. This, the industry suggests, is what will get public opinion on board the Biometrics-on-the-Move-Train. After all, what distinguishes total, invisible and instantaneous border controls from their absence?

The difference matters only insofar as human rights enter the picture. Even considering the strong commitment to human rights reiterated in all EU-funded projects, evidence of effective mitigation measures and democratic safeguards is lacking.

In fact, “Projects like these are more of the same expensive, resource-depleting techno-solutionist fantasies that the EU has been pursuing for years”, former Statewatch director Chris Jones told AlgorithmWatch, “pursuing a form of security that is focused on tracking, monitoring and measuring people and their movements, rather than providing the things people need for meaningful security: healthcare, welfare, education.”

When the border becomes a “moment of movement”, every moment becomes a checkpoint. That's not freedom of movement — it is its opposite. Because a border that follows you everywhere has not disappeared. It becomes a border you cannot escape.

Read more on our policy & advocacy work on ADM and People on the Move.