That was my initial interpretation. There is an icon on the front/cover that looks like a little camera near the bottom that was not on my prior one (IIRC) that I thought was some indication of electronic or database status. So I was speculating it was checking to see if the passport was current enough to have one of those.
But as mentioned, "front" per UA means the main page with the strings of numbers at the bottom.
TRRed