sundaymorningstaple wrote:It's the AFAIK that I worry about.

(What AFAIK means is "You don't know")
Well, I'm fairly sure I'd notice if somebody tried to get my retinal imprints, especially as I applied for a new biometric passport just today and wasn't asked to hand over anything more sinister than a picture...
Sorry, but this time I think your response might have been a tad unwarrented.....
Sure, there are oodles of information about you in all sorts of databases all over the world, especially here in Singapore where "privacy" is considered a joke (except when it comes to publishing how much rich people earn or where they got their money from!). But why would anybody want to encode it into a
passport, of all places? If the police in country A want to get your data from country B, they can request access directly and get it immediately, instead of waiting for you to show up toting a passport with a whopping 32K bytes of info, most of that already used for the picture.