European watchdog orders Europol to delete 4 petabytes of illegally collected personal data

guest · Jan 10, 2022

January 10, 2022

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has ordered Europol to delete huge quantities of personal data about hundreds of thousands of people. The European Union's police agency has been found to have illegally collected billions of pieces of data about criminals, suspected terrorists and innocent citizens.

The colossal stash of information has been dubbed a "big data ark" by privacy experts, and it includes data gathered by hacking encrypted services and NSA-style grabs. The data store was collected over a period of six years, and the EDPS ruling means that Europol must delete data that has been stored for over six months. The agency also has a year to determine what of the remaining data it may legally continue to hold.
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Europol has been accused of engaging in mass surveillance, and has been likened to the NSA with its undiscerning dragnet approach to data collection. As well as collecting and storing data from crime reports, much of the information is also the fruit of hacking, and a portion of it relates to asylum seekers innocent of any crimes.
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The Guardian has seen internal documents relating to Europol and says:

Among the quadrillions of bytes held are sensitive data on at least a quarter of a million current or former terror and serious crime suspects and a multitude of other people with whom they came into contact. It has been accumulated from national police authorities over the last six years, in a series of data dumps from an unknown number of criminal investigations.
But while the ruling has been welcomed by privacy advocates, just as was the case with the tactics employed by the NSA, Europol's data collection has its defendants, including Ylva Johansson.

Law enforcement authorities need the tools, resources and the time to analyse data that is lawfully transmitted to them. In Europe, Europol is the platform that supports national police authorities with this herculean task.
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EDPS: EDPS orders Europol to erase data concerning individuals with no established link to a criminal activity

On 3 January 2022, the EDPS notified Europol of an order to delete data concerning individuals with no established link to a criminal activity (Data Subject Categorisation). This Decision concludes the EDPS’ inquiry launched in 2019.

In the context of its inquiry, the EDPS admonished Europol in September 2020 for the continued storage of large volumes of data with no Data Subject Categorisation, which poses a risk to individuals’ fundamental rights. While some measures have been put in place by Europol since then, Europol has not complied with the EDPS’ requests to define an appropriate data retention period to filter and to extract the personal data permitted for analysis under the Europol Regulation.
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reasonablePrivacy · Jan 11, 2022

OUCH!

FanJ · Jan 11, 2022

Europol’s Statement on the Decision of the European Data Protection Supervisor - 11 Jan 2022
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media...cision-of-european-data-protection-supervisor

Committed to the highest standards of data protection, Europol first reached out proactively to the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) on 1 of April 2019 to seek guidance on the processing of large and complex datasets which are collected in lawful, judicial investigations. Europol is increasingly receiving from its Member States datasets to help with their processing and analysis.
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Since then, Europol has followed the guidance given by the EDPS and has kept its Management Board updated on the progress achieved.
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Read more there.

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European watchdog orders Europol to delete 4 petabytes of illegally collected personal data

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European watchdog orders Europol to delete 4 petabytes of illegally collected personal data

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