Europol data processing plan poses 'serious risks' to privacy, EU watchdog warns

A plan to ramp up the data processing powers of the EU’s policing agency Europol poses “serious risks” to people’s privacy, Europe’s data protection supervisor warned Thursday.

The European Commission in June unveiled a plan to make Europol the central system for police forces to trade and analyse data using the latest technologies — part of a wider strategy to give EU justice agencies more firepower to tackle cross-border crime and terrorism.

The reforms include a fundamental shift in how Europol sifts through the data it collects, relaxing current rules that require data to be sorted into different categories before determining if Europol can legally use it. That’s been a “key operational bottleneck,” the Commission has said, since Europol deals with high volumes of unstructured data.

In an opinion published Thursday, the European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski said that the proposal “creates serious risks, particularly regarding the processing of the personal data of individuals with no established criminal links.”

The proposal would allow Europol to retain data on a “vast” number of people with no links to criminal activity “for an extensive and unspecified period of time,” the supervisor warned.

The EDPS is the data protection authority that supervises EU institutions including Europol and advises the Commission on the privacy implications of legislative reforms.

The privacy watchdog acknowledged that Europe's security architecture needs to be developed to protect against increasingly complex criminal threats, but underlined that the proposed Europol reform “must provide robust safeguards and real oversight.”