After the EU data protection officer obliged the police authority Europol to delete large amounts of data, the EU Commission is relying on a rapid change in the legal situation to prevent this.

"Law enforcement agencies need the tools, resources and time to analyze data that is legally transmitted to them," wrote EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson on Twitter.

Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and the Benelux countries based in Brussels.

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The EU Police Office supports the national authorities and is "not only a global leader in the use of technology, but also in the protection of fundamental rights". The amendment she proposed last year to the Europol regulation, which is currently in the legislative process, strikes the right balance between protecting personal data and protecting citizens from serious crime, said the Swede.

The EU's top data protection officer, Wojciech Wiewiorowski, ordered on Monday that Europol had to delete all personal data that was not related to specific criminal offenses within one year. According to the applicable legal basis, the police authority may only keep data longer if they categorize them, for example according to "suspects", "witnesses" and "informants". If this does not happen or is not possible, records must be deleted.

However, no deadline has yet been set for this;

Wiewiorowski started it at six months.

The data are made available to Europol, which itself has no investigative powers, by the Member States.

These are large amounts of data that were obtained from the infiltration of crypto telephone services such as Encrochat and provide information about organized crime. 

In 2019, the office of the data protection officer opened an investigation into how Europol handles personal data and repeatedly asked the police to make changes.

Europol criticized the decision to delete it.

It will affect the authority's ability to evaluate large and complex data sets.

This often takes more than six months, especially in prominent cases in recent years.