> 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.
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.
[2] also DNA. The English DNA database is scary.