EU Parliament votes for biometric people-tracking database

The Parliament aims to interconnect a series of border-control, migration, and law enforcement systems into a large, biometrics-tracking, searchable database of EU and non-EU citizens. This new database is set to unify records on over 350 million people.

CIR will aggregate both identity records (names, dates of birth, passport numbers, and other identification details) and biometrics (fingerprints and facial scans), and make its data available to all border and law enforcement authorities. Its primary role will be to simplify the jobs of EU border and law enforcement officers.

The European Parliament and the European Council promised “proper safeguards” to protect peoples right to privacy and regulate officers access to data, according to ZDNet. Once up and running, CIR will become one of the biggest people-tracking databases in the world, right behind the systems used by the Chinese government and India’s Aadhar system, the online publication added.

In the US, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations run similar biometrics databases.