Britain is trying to set up an EU-wide network of travel databases to record the movements and personal details of millions of air passengers within Europe.

The home secretary, Theresa May, is hoping that, when they meet on Monday, European justice and home affairs ministers will back a massive expansion of EU proposals, which as they stand would apply only to flights in and out of Europe and see travellers' details anonymised after 30 days.

May, who was elected on a pledge to scale back the "database state", has been lobbying hard for the data – known as passenger name records (PNR) – to also be collected for flights within Europe, tripling the number of journeys tracked. She wants the data to be stored for up to six years.

The home secretary has already won the backing of 17 other EU member states for the move but is heading for a civil liberties clash with the European parliament and the German government.

She has argued that the expansion is needed to combat terrorism but critics say it will involve the storage of a huge amount of personal data, leaving room for random profiling.

PNR data is already collected for flights between Europe and America, with the airlines required to pass on passenger booking details to authorities.

The 19 separate items of personal information involved include home address, passport number, credit card details, mobile phone number and the traveller's itinerary.

The immigration minister, Damian Green, has accused the EU commission of not taking internal European border security seriously for opposing the extension of PNR to flights within Europe.

Green has also referred to an expanded PNR system across Europe as "a great prize for which we are searching" to support Britain's own E-borders programme which already tracks 90% of flights to and from Britain from outside the EU and 60% of flights from within the rest of the EU. The UK is the only European country that currently collects and analyses such data.

Britain has yet to decide whether to opt into the current EU directive on passenger name records, claiming it is inadequate on four key points:

•retention period: the current proposal envisages that an individual's details will be anonymised by being "masked" after 30 days and then archived for up to five years. The UK wants all the details held for three years on an 'active database' and then archived for a further three years.

•scale: the commission wants only data from passengers on flights to and from Europe from third countries, such as the US, to be stored. The UK wants it to cover flights within Europe as well. Others, such as Italy, are pressing for it cover ferry and rail travel as well.

•purpose: EU wants the data to be used only to investigate terrorism and serious crime. UK wants to use it for immigration as well.

•profiling: EU wants to explicitly exclude profiling. UK says it is against indiscriminate mass profiling but wants to use it for "intelligence-based targeting of individuals against patterns of behaviour''.

In a letter to the Hungarian interior minister, who is chairing Monday's meeting, May says an EU-wide system that includes all intra-EU flights must be urgently adopted.

She points out that excluding them "would rule out three-quarters of all flights that take off or land at EU airports". She adds: "That is not right. It would be a shame if, having taken the decision to have a PNR system, we missed the opportunity to do the job properly."

May also suggests that the potential costs involved could be reduced if each member state selected "high-risk" routes to collect passenger data, rather than seeking to cover all flights.

Each EU member state would hold a database of passenger details but would be able share the data with any other member to form a European-wide network.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green MEP, said the British scheme would never get through the European parliament. "This is a crazy proposal. A huge amount of data on EU citizens will be retained daily, without having any concrete investigations, leaving room for random profiling and data mining."

He said that an individual's identity could be restored to the data after the 30-day deadline, as it was being masked rather than destroyed.

His views are shared by the German government, which has been very vocal in its opposition to increased datasharing.