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Comment by pknight | Hacker News Reader

>There is no centralized database for EU citizens photos or fingerprints (not even at national level in many countries).

"The database will aggregate the details of more than 350 million people, including their identifying information, such as names, passport number, dates of birth, as well as biometrics like fingerprints and facial scans."

https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3074472/eu-parliament-v...

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>"will aggregate"

This was an announced intention in April this year. The implementation of this decision probably needs further approvals and ratifications, and even after that, it takes time. The source material does not even exist, and I expect that in some EU countries collecting this data of all citizens will not be possible due to country legislation. Thus this is certainly far from complete, if even started at all.

It's safe to say that there is no database of 350 million EU citizens' fingerprints that anyone could copy.

So we should wait until every one's details are leaked before deciding this is a bad idea because it will inevitably leak?

This is like the police refusing to respond to death threats until the person is dead.

What they seem to be saying is not that the data hasn't leaked, but that it likely does not even exist. If that's true, a headline of "X has been copied" would be wrong if X didn't exist.

The data does exist, and they are and have been collating it into one super database according to the article pknight posted. So I go back to my argument:

> So we should wait until every one's details are leaked before deciding this is a bad idea because it will inevitably leak?

You claim the data does exist - but where did it come from? There has been no program to forcibly collect fingerprints of all EU citizens. There is some biometric data collected for Schengen passports, but not even close to all people even have a passport. And if you claim my biometric passport fingerprints are in that DB, you are claiming that the police in my country has performed a massive illegal data handover. If you have evidence of that, give it - heads will roll.

Maybe that data doesn't exist in your country.

In mine, the police has the picture and fingerprints of everyone older than 12 years old and any younger person that needed an ID card for whatever reason, travelling being just one.

Maybe that information has been shared with that database, maybe it hasn't. I have no way of knowing. Other EU countries have the same level of information about their citizens (and some record even more data).

Can we simply agree that what the UK has done is bad, should be investigated and, if true, the people resposible should face charges for it? Or should we spend days arguing about what information might/might not have been copied and how many people have been afected?

I'm downvoting all the comments about "my country" without saying which country that is.

No useful discussion can result from comments like this.

A bit late to the discussion, but does it really change that much if, instead of "my country", I say "Spain"?

In this case Spain hasn't done anything wrong (the data gathering for the id cards was done before entering the EU and complies with EU's regulations[0]). Other EU countries gather less or more data according to their specific legislations.

The country in question here is the UK and, to a lesser extent, the US. Specifics about other EU countries are, IMHO, irrelevant.

[0] Another question, for a different discussion, is if they should record all that data.

For most countries, biometric passport data is only stored inside the passport's chip and not in a (national or otherwise) database. It's to be used by border control (of other countries) to compare the person presenting the passport with the (signed) data.

For Romania, it is in a national database. Source: family member that is a high ranking policeman, he checked my records and there is more than I thought, having a perfectly clean criminal record.

They are just saying the title should not contain the word "all". The linked tweet doesn't contain it either.

No. That is not what I wrote, nor is it what I implied.

I simply mean that the claim about fingerprints of 350 M EU citizens copied cannot be true.

The EU has been collecting fingerprints since 2004, they do have that data.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-eu-fingerprints/fingerprin...

That link does not describe the EU collecting fingerprints it just reports that their is an EU requirement for passports to contain biometic data. The EU do not collect or store that data national governments do.

No. That link does not say so. Biometric passport data is collected by national goverments, not EU.

I received written death threats (letters cut and pasted from various papers) once and the police ignored it. I got attacked a week later

The link suggests that this was announced in April this year. Do you think all the necessary DBs have already been connected? I would expect it to happen next year earliest.

I suspect it's nowhere near live yet, but it's relevant to this topic. There will be a massive new database and it's a terribly unlikely that this data will not be leaked or shared at some point.

So what if it was announced in April?

Do we really believe we ca trust these groups with this data?

This is like the Vogons justifying blowing up a planet because the paperwork was filed years ago.

It’s not about the details. It’s about trust in institutions and I’m pretty sure we can see we should have none with these official bodies and the corporate buddies they give our work away to

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