On Wednesday the European Commission will propose that all people who travel in and out of Europe will be fingerprinted, including U.S. citizens.

If the plan is approved it will mean that information about millions of citizens will be added to databases that could be shared by governments.

The United States and Japan already require for the foreign travelers to be fingerprinted and photographed before entering the country.

Now the European security officials require the same thing, for the fingerprints of the travelers and the photographs of some of them to be stored in a Europe-wide database, the Washington Post reports.

This is part a growing trend which takes place on both sides of the Atlantic to collect data and to identify and track people for national security.

A European Commission official familiar with the new fingerprinting plan said: “It's the only way to be really sure about identifying people. With biometric data, it's much easier to track people and know who has come in and who has gone out, including possible terrorists.”

The plan won’t probably start until next year. The fingerprints will be collected most probably upon the arrival of travelers and checked against a database. That will happen in airports where fingerprints would be taken electronically.

Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch member of parliament who tracks privacy and security issues, said that she doesn’t see the use for it. “Does this actually make the world a safer place?" she said.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, says that these measures are welcomed by them. “Measures like fingerprint and passenger-data collection can disrupt the ability of terrorists to move easily across international borders. They also serve to protect American citizens traveling overseas,” he added.

Some of the lawmakers and advocates are saying that the European Commission is following the pattern used by the United States without any second thoughts.

European privacy advocate Simon Davies said that the border fingerprint systems have a low rate as they are used more frequently.

"Adding a hundred million fingerprints of dubious quality on top of an inaccurate database will exponentially increase the failure rate," he added.