European Court: The passport fingerprinting law is invalid and has no consequences – IT Pro – News

The idea that a fingerprint in a passport, let alone an ID card, in any way “protects” citizens from passport fraud is complete nonsense. Who verified that the fingerprint on the ID card or passport matches your fingerprint? Practically no one.

The municipality of Breda, for example (20 thousand passports annually), checks on average once a year. Westland Municipality only at the request of the passport holder himself. The municipality of Zeist never materializes. In the municipality of Eindhoven, it is possible to “count on the fingers of one hand.”

For comparison, in one sample, nearly 20% of fingerprints taken there turned out to be incorrect. For example, because the scanner did not do its job correctly or was placed upside down (10-15% of cases). Therefore, it is absolutely impossible to arrest a person for a forged or forged passport on the basis that the fingerprint does not match. After all, this is the case for about 20% of passports and, assuming mutual independence, 4% for both. You can't judge that.

The police never look at the fingerprint in the passport. The law does not allow them to do so, unless they have an express exception to this, after which they still have to request a printed copy from the municipality.

Foreign customs never look at the fingerprint in the passport, because they don't (officially) have the encryption key to do so. The Netherlands does not have keys for other countries, so we cannot verify fingerprints of, for example, a Belgian or a German.

The US Immigration Service takes fingerprints, but for its own database. They don't compare them to the fingerprints in the passport, because again they can't.

Overall, it adds nothing, costs a lot of money, loses more privacy, and most importantly, opens a new potential source of security leaks.