'Policing that does not respect fundamental rights cannot ultimately be effective.'
Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union, has been ordered to delete a huge store of personal data gleaned from police agencies in EU member states over the past six years. The deletion order comes from the European Data Protection Supervisor , a watchdog body overseeing EU institutions’ compliance with privacy and data protection legislation.
— equivalent to hundreds of billions of pages of printed text — and includes data on at least a quarter of a million current or former terror and serious crime suspects, along with other people in its contact networks. The data has been drawn from criminal investigations conducted by national police authorities in EU countries, which were then shared with Europol.
“It’s unclear the precise types of data Europol want to hold onto so keenly, but we do know they are large datasets consisting at least in part of data about people who Europol do not currently feel they can categorise within ‘suspects’, ‘potential future criminals’, ‘contacts and associates’, ‘victims’, ‘witnesses’ and ‘informants’,” said Michael Veale, associate professor in digital rights and regulation at the University College London Faculty of Laws.