Schengen Area Data Sharing
 

How does data sharing work in the Schengen zone? For example, if you enter one country as a citizen of a EU member state - (e.g. BRU in Belgium), does that show up as your entry point in another country when you exit (e.g. CDG in France). Or do they not care?

It doesn't work easily and automatically. There is still no implemented cross-border-shared, Schengen-wide entry-exit database tracking applicable to EU member state citizens or even non-citizen/non-national, long-term residents. This kind of thing comes up often when say the Danish authorities are trying to calculate the claimed physical presence of Danish residents who may have a lot of their entries and exits into the Schengen zone take place via non-Danish, Schengen ports. If the Schengen entries and exits aren't all via flights from the same country's national entry-exit system and some or much of the travel doesn't involve flights, then the electronic records are even more fragmentary.

There is also still no implemented cross-border-shared, Schengen-wide entry-exit database tracking applicable to third country nationals when a visa is not involved.

Even as just a US citizen, the Schengen countries' port authorities have a very fragmentary understanding of the duration of my physical presence in the Schengen area and often default to using the stamps to try to determine physical presence because the way I travel rather often circumvents the ability of any given Schengen country's national entry/exit database to keep track of my trips. Only after the EU/EEA gets to using the still-under-development Schengen-wide entry-exit system and no longer need to rely upon stamps, then maybe eventually they will get around to also tracking EU/EEA citizens via this still-under-development system or something like it.

https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/e-...-system-ees_en

Thanks. Very informative.

Schengen issue are generally discussed in the Europe forum.

Please follow this thread as it moves there.

TWA884
Travel Safety/Security co-moderator

When you enter a Schengen country, your name is run through an Interpol and a few other databases to see if you're on any watchlists (or if there are any flags tied to the document you're using). Your entry is recorded in a country's database, and there's some bilateral integration of databases.

Originally planned for 2020, by 2022 a common Entry-Exit system will allow for real-type sync-ing of entries/exits, eliminating the need to stamp passports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entry-Exit-System

The way each country in the Schengen area runs electronic checks for a Schengen-entering/exiting person varies a lot, even as there are some common requirements for the checks.

The national differences in how the electronic checks are done and even in what is retained from a check can lead to some bizarre situations at passport control. Case in point being that Dutch passport control thought that I was some Baltic-area crime lord, and that was even as no other Schengen country’s passport control has ever made that ridiculous mistake. My travel docs are clean and my biographical info has almost nothing in common with that flagged Baltic mafia boss, and yet AMS passport control would slow me down and had no complete picture of my Schengen entry/exit/stay history. Never had that kind of ridiculous flagging issue at non-Dutch, Schengen ports of entry/exit when using the very same docs.

Don't confuse the various systems. While border crossings of EU citizens are not in a centralised system, the SIS (Schengen Information System) is. When the Dutch queried the SIS it may have returned a false positive regarding another individual and have had instructions to inform a particular agency about movements. This is the most likely scenario for your case. Kind of like the no-fly TSA list except they don't provide a redress number to you to avoid the false positives. For non-EU citizens who do not need a visa, there are centralised databases (ETIAS and RRS), but they are not yet operational. Slated for 2022 though.

SIS is not an entry/exit tracker even for me.

I have enough access and experiences — even same-day experiences — to know what was going on with my own circumstances. It wasn’t SIS that kicked back a false positive. It was just the Dutch. ;) I use US passports at Schengen passport control, as I’m not a dual-citizen, and there were days last year where I crossed Schengen passport control even 3-4 times in a day.

Gotcha! :)

I’m sure the Dutch passport control guy was initially hoping to claim a big catch, but the chances of any objective, informed or otherwise sane person confusing me for a Baltic crime lord is about the same as the chances of someone identifying me as being Mickey or Minnie Mouse in the original Disney cartoon classics that many a Swede and Finnish Swede has watched on Christmas Eve.

Whenever I entered Germany from outside Schengen for the past 3 years or so, the border officers would spend several minutes doing lots of typing, but this never happened in any other Schengen country.

Ditto!

After a trip to Germany I stupidly lost my UK passport, replaced it and returned to Germany with the new one about three weeks later. ‘I see you got your new passport’, said the German immigration officer unprompted.

I was well impressed

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.

About 8 years ago I was flying back home from the States through Rome, where I found out that I had lost my passport (most probably on the plane). I went to the Polizia di Stato offices at FCO to report it and I continued my trip a few hours later. Then, a week later I received an email from the US Dept. of Homeland Security informing me that mt ESTA had been revoked, though without any reason being offered. Then, weeks later, I went to the Hellenic Police HQ at Heraklion to apply for a new passport. I had a rather heated discussion with the responsible police officer who insisted that the correct thing to do would have been to report the loss of the passport at the Greek Embassy in Rome and not to his Italian colleagues. During the exchange of arguments, he printed my name in his computer and Looking over his shoulder, I saw a picture of my passport (the two pages with my photograph and the personal data), with a big bold label saying "Lost" or something similar. Well, data shared at least between Italian PdS, the US CBP/DHS and the Hellenic Police, ie. Schengen and beyond? ;)

When the Italians and/or Greeks filed an entry in the national database, for Europol or directly for the Interpol SLTD database, the reported stolen/lost travel document data that gets into the Interpol SLTD database gets used within and beyond the Schengen area.

The US cross-checks ESTAs’ passport details with data from the Interpol SLTD database. And in this way when it comes to US DHS’s attention, the ESTA getting revoked shouldn’t be surprising.