A new anti-terror document from the European Commission outlines proposals to request 42 separate pieces of information to request from passengers before they fly.

Those flying to and from Europe would be forced to submit a long list of personal details, which can be stored for up to five years.

Although some of the fields are fairly standard such as nationality, or frequent flyer information, other such data could include a person’s meal preferences, or the number of one-way tickets bought and how many flights someone has missed.

The European Commission says the move is necessary in order to help combat terrorism and has been supported by ministers across the EU.

The decision by the European Commission would signal a U-turn from an earlier decision made by the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee in April 2013, which rejected the European Commission’s proposal for the recoding of Passenger Name Record (PNR) data. The Civil Liberties committee said that airlines should collect PNR data, during check-in.

All of this information would create a pan-European ‘super database,’ with the information on tens of millions of air travelers shared amongst the 28 EU countries.

However not everyone is in favour of the plans.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, vice chairman of the European parliament’s civil liberties committee, said: “The commission plans are an affront to the critics of the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice who have said that data retention without any link to a certain risk or suspicion isn’t proportionate.

“It is an open breach of fundamental rights to blanketly retain all passenger data.Instead of a full take of PNR [passenger name record] data, we need a focus on suspects and risk flights. The Paris attacks have shown that mass retention was not effective in fighting jihadis.”

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