Israel’s Interior Ministry has asked the Knesset for an extension of an emergency order to continue collecting fingerprints until 2025 for its national biometric ID database, according to Haaretz.
The proposal made by Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked to Israel’s parliament would allow the ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority to retain its fingerprint database for three more years. The authority says it needs about two years to buy facial recognition technology that would replace fingerprint biometrics. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, would need to vote on the measure.
The request, if approved, would continue an emergency order that will otherwise expire on May 31 and is not part of a 2017 biometric database law. The Knesset ordered the Interior Ministry to scrub fingerprint biometrics from a database of passport information in October 2020, after Israel’s State Comptroller found that a database containing the biometric data of 4.5 million Israeli citizens was improperly secured or encrypted. The committee that approved the database law says fingerprint collection should be halted and only pictures of faces should be kept.
The Interior Ministry said the state would have to provide funding for facial recognition technology to replace the fingerprint database before it would consider deleting it.
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