Hi. This may sound stupid, but is it safe to renew a passport in most places if it’s been years since it’s been expired?

General
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Hi.

I know a little bit about privacy, but want to increase my knowledge.

I follow different blogs, subreddits on the topic of privacy and heard of this place.

I have started replacing apps/services I use with more privacy-friendly alternatives.

But my question is related to renewing a passport and for privacy reasons I don’t want to say my country, but to help you help me narrow it down let’s say it’s in Europe in one of the bigger countries.

I’ve heard traveling is not considered private, but I don’t have much experience of traveling abroad and want to know if it’s likely renewing a years-expired passport is deeply harmful to my privacy or okay because they likely already have my information already from my original passport or by other means.

I’m not saying this because I have an urgent (emergency) need to travel, but is renewing a passport in a large European country giving them any more of my data than they have already?

Also, what risk would I be to a data breach?

Appreciate any help anyone can give.

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Dunno about your country but in mine, everyone have national ID with national personal number, so when you making passport, you just legitimate yourself with national ID and they have all your data in system already. Only new thing is fresh photo that you need to supply.

And yes, data breach is highly likelly, at least for my country. There’s nobody sane at higher ups and they dissmiss anyone sane from administration.
And it is EU country.

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Some EU countrys require fingerprints in all newly issued passports.

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Risk of a data breach isn’t zero, but larger EU countries are pretty good about security…so far. Mostly.

But if you’ve already had a passport, they already have your data. What you would be providing is an updated photo and updated contact info, maybe an address. Fingerprints, potentially, but that’s also something that’s supposed to be an entry/exit requirement for the EU and they keep messing up implementation. If you’ve ever already given the government your fingerprints, then they already have that, too.

It’s up to you to decide what “deeply harmful” to your privacy means. If you don’t have a detailed definition for that, then something as critical as a passport is likely not going to harm much. But that’s for you to decide based on your threat model.

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Some require fingerprints in national ID’s also. I’ve got one month earlier that it was otherwise possible because my old one had no fingerprints.

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Then I don’t think the answer really matters. If you need to travel you need to travel, and you need to give the info to get the passport. This is a strange question, because safety is relative, and it seems in your case you don’t have the option of avoiding it.

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I guess the country being mentioned is Russia and renewing a passport probably means that they will get a new picture of your face, but they already possess sufficient data about every citizen, so I don’t think it makes any difference.