As a regular US traveler, I'm ok with that if the alternative is handing over EU citizens data to a known bad actor.
From the presentation:
For all travellers (and asylum seekers) before entry into USA
Hit/ No hit query of the foreign databases
On hit: retrieval of existing data record in pull procedure
A part of visa issuance by a U.S. Embassy is a background check against both US databases and those of the local country. I believe all visa appointments perform digital capture of fingerprints, face, along with anything on an e-Passport.
So this gets the U.S. nearer to equivalence in VWP with what they can already do with the visa processes?
If you don’t want the U.S. to hold your biometric information it sounds like you just won’t be traveling to that country any longer.
So the change is the “watch list” lookup / handover of records for hits. Hate to be in the camp saying that “if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” but I honestly assumed that those checks were already done.