Dutch police unnecessarily store data of everyone who ever made contact
The Dutch police unnecessarily keep the data of all persons who have ever made contact. The police store the privacy-sensitive personal data and automatically keep track of life events such as relocations, marriages and births.
The police have long been concerned about unnecessary data collection, according to an internal memo from 2020 in the hands of Faith. The National Office for Identity Data already indicated in 2015 that it was concerned about this state of affairs. In the memo, the police expresses concern for ‘image damage and a sharply increasing workload’. However, the system has not been modified in the meantime.
The police automatically requests data from the Basic Registration of Persons from persons who have ever made contact because they receive a ‘customer indication’ in the system. This includes data such as the nationality, address and citizen service number of the person. Even if the person has a child, moves house or gets married, this automatically ends up in the police system.
Moreover, the data is never deleted even after the death of a person. The police are following more and more people in this way and are also unnecessarily storing information that is no longer relevant to a particular case. According to the police, this currently concerns the data of about nine million citizens. The unnecessary data collection can entail risks, if only because a large part of the ICT systems of the Dutch police do not comply with the law.
According to Bits of Freedom privacy expert Rejo Zenger, the police are also breaking the law because they are not allowed to collect more data than ‘strictly necessary for their task’. In a response to Trouw, the police deny that they are violating the law: “We have a legal basis for using and updating that data.”
The internal memo states that the police want to draw up a new policy so that not everyone who contacts them is automatically followed. However, nothing has come of the policy in recent years. According to the police, this is because the applications cannot be turned off overnight. Reportedly, the police still want to start implementing the policy this year: “We have come to the conclusion that we can manage with less data, and we are working on that.”