Philip Blenkinsop and Samantha Koester report:
Identity cards held by EU citizens will be required to include digital images of the holder’s fingerprints as part of a crackdown on fraudulent documents used by criminals and extremists, the European Commission proposed on Tuesday.
In a proposal likely to make waves in countries such as Germany, whose history has made data privacy a guarded asset, the Commission wants to do away with paper-based identity documents that are easy to falsify and can be used to enter the bloc from non-EU countries.
The Commission said in its proposal on Tuesday that it would not oblige countries to introduce ID cards, but those countries that use them would be required to include two pieces of biometric data: an image of two fingerprints and a facial image.
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