Privacy International has issued an open letter on the plans of the International Civil Aviation Organization to track a billion people through biometrically enabled passports. .

According to the letter, “The ICAO has agreed that the initial international biometric standard for passports will be facial mapping. Adequate memory space in newly issued passports will be reserved for additional biometrics such as fingerprinting at the discretion of every government. The EU is already calling for fingerprints to be included, along with an associated European register of all biometrics. National authorities will store and share these vast data reserves.”