In 2017, security authorities in Germany were granted access to biometric passport photos from electronic ID cards and passports, without justification. Despite a federal retrieval ordinance regulating technical details, access often fails due to technical issues. The German government wants to oblige the country’s approximately 4,300 municipal registration offices to enable photo retrieval “at any time”. This is part of a draft law to modernize passport, identity card, and immigration documents. The initiative was launched by Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser.
According to the government, due to a lack of federal legal obligation, online access to passport photos in state and local administration is still “not possible or only possible to a very limited extent”. Currently, only two federal states allow automated photo retrieval, but only for authorized authorities in their jurisdictions. The federal government estimates the cost of implementing a mirror database at the state level, which will allow authorities to upload or retrieve information, to be 4.42 million euros.
A constitutional complaint by the Society for Freedom Rights against the general right of retrieval is still pending. The license for security authorities criticized by data protection activists as a Big Brother measure is “tantamount to a loss of informational control,” the association complained in 2018. The federal government estimates that police officers conduct 33.6 million identity checks per year.
The new draft law will also reduce the minimum age for using online ID (eID) from 16 to 13 years, allowing the ID card to be used more frequently for age verification. If a citizen moves, the newly responsible registration office should be able to access the personal data previously stored elsewhere without delay. The delivery of new personal documents by post will be permitted, and children’s passports, which were valid for one year, will no longer be issued to create a uniform solution for German passport documents. However, the federal working group of municipal IT service providers Vitako raised concerns about Faeser’s original draft bill.
