Machine readable passports only contain the information that is written on the passport. Minimal biographic data. The new RFID passports are supposed to have a scanned picture and the potential for fingerprints and iris scans.
http://www.britishairways.com/travel...ver_en_row#mrp
"It will include a contactless chip of at least 32 Kbytes of memory used to store biographic and biometric data and images. This data can then be instantly transferred in a contactless fashion to a passport reading system.
In order to achieve interoperability between all the passports and readers of the countries that use the e-passport, their manufacturers will rely on the implementation of international standards for compression and formatting of this biographic and biometric data. These standards are defined by ICAO, and will reference ISO SC 37 standards for biometrics.
ICAO has defined what they call the LDS or "logical data structure", which identifies the fields where biographic and biometric data will be placed on the chip in the e-passport. For example, "Data Group 1" holds the biographic data we typically associate with a passport, such as name, nationality, and date of birth. "Data Group 2" holds the "global interchange feature", a compressed facial image which will serve as the universal biometric. Datagroups 3 and 4 are intended for fingerprint and iris biometric images and data, respectively. "
http://www.icao.int/mrtd/download/technical.cfm