Europol ordered to delete huge stash of personal data

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Europol has been told it needs to delete a huge database of information it has collected on EU citizens over the last few years equally it cannot prove exactly why it is still keeping the data around.

The social club has been given to the police enforcement agency of the Eu by the European Information Protection Supervisor (EDPS). EDPS is the data watchdog organization that ensures European union institutions remain compliant with the bloc's privacy and information protection rules.

This motility is a step up from the EDPS' 2019 investigation, in which it concluded that Europol was storing private data on potential criminals and terrorism suspects without actually checking whether or non the data harvesting was justified. As a upshot, European union citizens were at risk of beingness wrongfully accused of crime and terrorism, and perhaps even at risk of identity theft and data leaks.

A win for privacy advocates

Given that Europol failed to properly respond to the earlier conclusions, EDPS has now given more than physical orders and a stricter borderline of a year to go the task done.

"While some measures accept been put in place by Europol since and then, Europol has non complied with the EDPS' requests to ascertain an appropriate data memory period to filter and to extract the personal data permitted for assay under the Europol Regulation," the EDPS' press release reads.

The stash allegedly contains 4 petabytes of data.

"Europol has dealt with several of the data protection risks identified in the EDPS' initial research. However, there has been no significant progress to address the core concern that Europol continually stores personal data about individuals when it has not established that the processing complies with the limits laid down in the Europol Regulation," noted the EDPS' Wojciech Wiewiórowski.

"Such drove and processing of data may amount to a huge volume of data, the precise content of which is often unknown to Europol until the moment it is analysed and extracted - a process often lasting years. A half dozen-month period for pre-assay and filtering of large datasets should enable Europol to meet the operational demands of EU Member States relying on Europol for technical and analytical support, while minimising the risks to individuals' rights and freedoms. Furthermore, agreement the operational needs of Europol and the amount of data collected so far, I have decided to grant Europol a period of 12 months to ensure compliance with the Conclusion for the datasets already in Europol's possession."

And while privacy advocates volition praise EDPS' moves, not everyone volition agree. Eu Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson told The Guardian that law enforcement agencies need "the tools, resources, and the time, to analyze data that is lawfully transmitted to them. In Europe, Europol is the platform that supports national police authorities with this herculean task."