Friday 15 April 2016

EU plan to collect, not share, air traveler data is ‘absurd'

Air passengers entering or leaving the European Union will have their movements kept on file by police authorities from 2018 under draft legislation approved by the European Parliament.

Critics, however, say a lack of provisions to share the data severely limits the plan's usefulness.

Airlines running flights into or out of the EU must hand over the data to national Passenger Information Units (PIUs) that will hold the data for law enforcers. Member states may choose to gather data from travel agencies and to retain information about passengers on flights within the EU too.

However, there will be no centralized EU database of arriving and departing passengers, and no automatic sharing of data between the various national PIUs. With open land borders between countries in the Schengen Area, and no mandatory collection of information on intra-EU flights, it will be difficult for investigators to use the data to determine whether a person of interest is in the EU.

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