A data ‘black hole’: Europol ordered to delete vast store of personal data

5 comments
  1. This revelation worries me. Europol should not be able to indiscriminately hoover up and keep data on people indefinitely irrespective of whether they are actually involved in crimes or not.

  2. I guess it’s essentially what NSA/ GCHQ/ other national intelligence agencies have and are doing anyway, except it’s pan-EU.

    I’m quite surprised it’s been targeted in this way.

  3. Well that is a rollercoaster of an article (structure is a bit odd). So basically they’ve been given a year to sort out data collected from various sources.

    The actual issue is they seem to have a collected a large amount of data but they haven’t properly categorised it so they don’t know what they have.

    As a data person, having to much data can be as bad as to little for timely reporting and actions. Having loads of historical is great for retroactive analysis (not ideal for a police force, good for machine learning though potentially illegal).

    Seems they should only be keeping 6 months of information (?) which seems weirdly low but could be a case of being told delete everything and start from scratch (not clear). If they had better controls it wouldn’t be such an issue it seems.

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