Yes, travelling is a lot easier across countries in the EU - but many European countries (including Germany) issue biometric passports which require your fingerprints. If you refuse to be fingerprinted, you are unlikely to be issued a passport. The fact that people consent to this shows that we have a sometimes contradictory stance on matters of privacy and data collection.
Back in October 2013, the European Court of Justice ruled that collecting fingerprints was a privacy incursion but that the greater need for security outweighed the privacy concern.
many European countries (including Germany) issue biometric passports which require your fingerprints. If you refuse to be fingerprinted, you are unlikely to be issued a passport.
Not true. I applied for a new German passport recently. They said "we can give you the biometric one - costs more, takes longer to process, has to be made in Germany and sent here ... or we can give you the normal one. The normal one's fine unless you want to go to 'certain' countries .. notably the US." I said give me the normal one, I've had enough of that country's immigration bullshit already.
In 2008 I had to get a biometrical passport because my flight back from Costa Rica went through Miami. The passports where at a pilot phase so they were twice as expensive and only valid for 5 years.
Once in Miami they didn't had the tech to read the biometrical data from the passport …
250$ for a Passport + 10$ for a phone call to the us embassy in Switzerland (yes, they only gave out information when calling their 4$/minute hotline) for 3 hours of waiting for my connecting flight. Thanks a lot.
Ah, and of course they did take fingerprints from all fingers and photos for their own database.
Since 2007 German passports must contain two fingerprints. They're encrypted with a key held by the German government, (claimed to be) stored on the passport only.
German ID cards can contain two fingerprints. Besides being optional, the same rules as for passports apply.
On entry to the USA they don't seem to actually use the fingerprint data on the passport, and they require you to give ten fingerprints plus photo.
The original claim is that the US required them. By now, many countries require the data on passports. But none of them seem to read it on foreign passports, and from what I understand they're not able to.
So the main reason is that the requirement exists to force countries to provider a higher baseline against forgery. Alternatively they planned to access the fingerprints, but countries couldn't agree on a common standard and ACL system, or the USA got screwed because they required "digitally stored fingerprints", which they got (hence _two_ fingerprints) - but not in a format they can actually use.
One of the reasons biometric passports spreaded so fast, was because the US required all foreign passport issued after 2006 to be biometric as specified by the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Within the EU (or Schengen Area to be precise) you don't need a passport to travel. An ID which is not biometric in most countries is sufficent.
What is the threat model for government knowing your fingerprints?
There are clear issues with communications - words taken out of context could paint you as all kinds of illegal/disagreeable things and land you in jail and/or destroy your career. Metadata is pretty much exclusively useful for guilt by association.
What bad things can happen if the government knows your fingerprints? What makes fingerprints any different from the other information on your passport? If the objection is that they are more difficult to fake... well, that's sort of the point.
Are we afraid that someone is going to take fingerprints from the passport database and plant them at crime scenes? Use them to unlock your iPhone while you're in custody? If you already warrant that kind of special attention, authorities will have no trouble getting your fingerprints anyway.,
> What bad things can happen if the government knows your fingerprints? What makes fingerprints any different from the other information on your passport? If the objection is that they are more difficult to fake... well, that's sort of the point.
A database of fingerprints[1] should contain the prints of as many criminals as possible and as few non-criminals as possible.
This reduces the possibility of false possibilities which carry a real chance of death if the police turn up to your house with guns.
Those false positives also distract efforts from the actual criminals.
And then there's the risk of feature creep - see also the vast misuse of social security numbers in the US.
Finally: a fingerprint is pretty much the definition of personal info and so anyone collecting and storing that information should have clear regulation about the use and storage of that information.
> This reduces the possibility of false possibilities which carry a real chance of death if the police turn up to your house with guns
In 2012, German police shot at people a grand total of 36 times. 35 of those 36 incidents were pure self defense situations ("life threatening situation"), resulting in 8 people killed. One incident was a shot at a fleeing subject, resulting in injury.
There were 54 warning shots and 14 shots on physical objects (tires, doors).
2012 was not an exceptional year, the trend is generally downwards (656 cases with 109 fatalities since 1998) Oh, and unlike England police in Germany are generally armed. They just don't use those firearms except as a last, last resort.
So the "real chance of you death" because of police showing up at your door is zero. I still don't like fingerprints in my passport.
First, the German government claims that the fingerprints aren't stored in a database, but only stored on the passport (using a different key than for the regular data, to restrict access) and otherwise destroyed during the production process. The stated purpose is to verify the authenticity of the passport.
No idea if that's actually true and if it's implemented sanely - if not, I can only hope for a whistleblower to report the difference between claim (and law) and implementation, which is an issue.
Second, the national ID card has no fingerprint requirement.
Third, as a German you need a passport only for international travel outside the Schengen zone: travel to the US, and _they_ collect another set of fingerprints (and photo) on every entry. Other countries have similar policies. For all I know, those fingerprints _are_ taken for the express purpose of keeping them in a database.
I'm not a friend of the fingerprint policy, and it's hard to prove that there are no databases generated as a by-product. But it's not the full blown disaster that people make of it.
> This reduces the possibility of false possibilities which carry a real chance of death if the police turn up to your house with guns.
How unreliable are fingerprints? Statistics would be interesting. DNA is pretty damn accurate, as I understand it.
Containing a higher proportion of criminials does not reduce the probability of a false positive. Merely having committed a crime in the past may mean you are more likely to commit a crime in the future, but it does not make it any more likely that you have committed any particular crime under investigation. This statement only seems to work if we are okay with sending any criminal to jail for any crime, rather than the specific crime that he/she actually committed.
> Finally: a fingerprint is pretty much the definition of personal info
That's a purely dogmatic argument. Why is the statement that "all personal information ought to also be considered private" justified?
> A database of fingerprints[1] should contain the prints of as many criminals as possible and as few non-criminals as possible.
Collecting fingerprints does not automatically mean the database is used in criminal investigation. Portugal has collected fingerprints in national ID cards since 1974, with provisions for limiting access to the database to selected organizations within the government. The end result is that this database is not used in criminal investigation. If it were, the court case would be thrown immediately.
Needless to say, biometric passports caused zero fuss here.
Some joker could lift your prints and leave them all over a crimescene. Government databases (especially local governments) are not usually very secure.
Back in October 2013, the European Court of Justice ruled that collecting fingerprints was a privacy incursion but that the greater need for security outweighed the privacy concern.