Face scans would become standard for passport applications

State Secretary Van der Burg of the Interior Ministry wants automatic facial comparison written into law as a standard part of applying for and issuing passports and Dutch identity cards. He said so in written answers to MPs' questions about municipalities using AI-run biometric scans to verify identity, received on 10 November.

The same would apply to first registration in the BRP (the population register) and in the basic population registers of the Caribbean Netherlands. An amendment to the Paspoortwet, the identity card law, the BRP law and the law on the Caribbean registers is being prepared. Van der Burg told the Tweede Kamer about the plan in a letter on 11 September.

For now, he said, municipalities that use face scanners to support these processes do so "on their own initiative and under their own responsibility".

Municipalities have long said they want to use facial comparison to support identity checks. "I understand that wish and I support it," Van der Burg wrote. He noted that the photo on an identity document can be 10 years old and that people's appearance can change a lot in that time.

He called the technology "proven" and "a valuable tool" under controlled conditions such as a council office. It needs adequate safeguards, he said: staff must be supported by it, no more data may be processed than necessary, and decisions may not rest solely on automated processing.

Face scanners are already used when non-residents are first registered in the BRP, which is the Interior Ministry's own responsibility. The ministry introduced them to prevent fraud after warning signs of vulnerabilities in the system, reported it to parliament in 2020 and carried out a data protection impact assessment.