A Swedish acquaintance has Swedish passports which work fine for border crossings for the US, Canada and all Schengen countries (with US-bound scheduled, major alliance flights last year) with a glaring exception of Germany. In Germany, the border control personnel sometimes flag down this person for lost/stolen/misused passport use despite the presented passports not being flagged as such anywhere else that uses the Interpol DB for reported lost/stolen travel documents. And for what it’s worth, the person comes across as stereotypically Scandinavian and Germanic and has never had a lost or stolen passport/national ID card. This kind of dynamic tells its own story about the limits of data-sharing even within just the EU/Schengen area, but it also tells a story about more than just that.

And back to my special experiences with Dutch passport control and what it says about data-sharing: German passport control has never considered me a Baltic crime lord even in the same weeks or even days where the Dutch passport control sometimes behaved like they had made a big catch when encountering me. And this is even when I am using the exact same travel documents.