New Zealand’s government has passed legislation to enable Immigration New Zealand (INZ) to store photos of all non-New Zealanders entering the country as well as require fingerprint samples in some circumstances.

The new policies are expected to benefit INZ through increased data on travelers, but also the travelers themselves as INZ Minister Jonathan Coleman believes that the new biometric data collection policies will help prevent identity theft and criminal misuse of passports at the borders as well as speed up visa application processing through quicker identity confirmation.

The new policies enacted by New Zealand were developed with a privacy impact assessment performed in conjunction with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in New Zealand as the data collected by INZ is not only available to their own government, but shared with the U.S., Canada, Australia and the UK as part of a Five Country Conference biometric program.