Europol Ordered to Purge Its Massive Trove of Private Citizen’s Data

Europol — the government body responsible for for quashing organized criminal offense and terrorist bodily process across the European Union — has long beenin the crosshairsof privacy advocator over its heady use of citizen surveillance . Now , it ’s looking like some European authorities are starting to sense the same ; the European Data Protection Supervisor ( EDPS)announcedon Monday that it ordered Europol to cancel a immense swath of the data point it had compiled on EU citizens . The data devoid - for - all has move many critic to accuse Europol of building the European equivalent of the NSA ’s invasive databases .

The EDPS give Europol one year to permeate its database and delete any intel on EU citizens that is n’t associate to any ongoing criminal investigations . While Europol will be able-bodied to keep on processing hoi polloi ’s personal data as part of investigations moving forward , datum that ’s unrelated to crime - doer is now required to be deleted after six calendar month , rather of being confine indefinitely . According to anew Guardian reportreleased the same Clarence Day as the EDPS ’s announcement , Europol had amassed upwards of four PB of data from people living across the European Union over the retiring few years .

“ Europol has not follow with the electronic data processing ’ requests to define an appropriate data holding time period to percolate and to extract the personal data permit for analysis under the Europol Regulation , ” the EDPS said in Monday ’s proclamation . “ This means that Europol was keeping this data for longer than necessary , wayward to the principles of datum minimisation and storage limitation , enshrined in the Europol Regulation . ”

Photo: Yuriko Nakao (Getty Images)

Europol ’s database get compiled from aslew of sourcesat jurisprudence enforcement agency across the European Union and ( shockingly ! ) the European Parliament , which recently green - lit the origination of amassive biometric databasecobbled together from the fingerprints , facial scan , and traveling document process at border checkpoint . And of course , there ’s a electronic internet ofprivate industry partnersregularly feeding their data into Europol ’s organization to aid with investigations .

The EDPS , which run as a watchdog mathematical group to keep EU say-so ’ data point practice in check , has been on Europol ’s case for a while . For the pastthree years , the group has been enquire Europol ’s discourse of sensitive data . In 2019 , the agency first found that the monumental datasets on a regular basis shared with Europol were n’t being checked to ensure that they in reality contained datum about criminals , as opposed to innocent civilians . A year afterward , the EDPSpublicly called outEuropol for continuing to process these unacquainted party ’s data , despite the fact that doing so could wrongfully link these people with criminal natural action .

Docsthat were relinquish today detailing the EDPS ’s on-going investigation show some of the details of how Europol pushed back against EDPS ’s requests . “ Despite requests from the EDPS , Europol continues to refuse to define a maximal data retention full point for the processing of datasets , ” the EDPS writes , explaining that instead , it insist on hold back these massive troves of data … well , however long it liked . So instead of continuing to hold off around , the EDPS decided to use its “ corrective powers ” to impose the aforementioned 6 - month retention insurance policy .

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