Civil rights activists: Digital passports enable biometric mass surveillance

The EU Commission's initiative for digital passports promises greater convenience, but is also likely to pave the way for biometric mass surveillance and automated discrimination. This is what the civil rights organization European Digital Rights (EDRi) fears in a recently published submission to the Brussels government institution. According to them, the project will have a disproportionate impact on fundamental rights such as privacy, data protection, non-discrimination and freedom of movement.

The Commission' s legislative package from October aims to speed up checks on people at the Schengen external borders using digital travel documents. It includes a proposal for a regulation for an application for the electronic transmission of travel data (EU travel app). This should make it possible to create digital travel documents based on passports. A second draft regulation provides for users to be able to create digital references based on their ID card and store them on their smartphone.

In its opinion, EDRi highlights three particularly dangerous aspects: the development of an infrastructure for biometric mass surveillance, the prioritization of commercial interests while simultaneously labeling travelers as high-risk individuals and the introduction of new and the reinforcement of existing forms of discrimination. The approach would require the creation of massive databases of facial images for automatic identification, the activists write. However, despite the associated data protection and cyber security risks for passengers, it does not explicitly state how sensitive personal data should be protected from illegitimate access.

20 seconds saved during checks

In practice, the digital verification of travel documents would require the processing of biometric data and make facial images of passengers available to the member states, explains EDRi. The very tagline of digitizing sovereign documents is misleading: in reality, it is "about the digital pre-transmission of information from the chip of existing physical passports and ID cards to the border authorities". Travelers would still have to carry the physical document with them. Ultimately, a potentially discriminatory identification procedure would be offset by a promised saving of 20 seconds during checks. This would primarily benefit airlines and security staff.

The EU consultation on the planned travel app runs until January 8. In Germany, the former traffic light coalition recently removed a clause criticized by former Federal Data Protection Commissioner Ulrich Kelber in a proposed law, according to which private bodies were to be given access to e-passport data and biometric features for travel clearance at airports, for example.

(vbr)