Limiting collection and uses of data by police: wishful thinking under an intelligence-led policing paradigm?

Intelligence-led policing, as a specific policing approach relying on information sharing and big data analytics, has a significant impact on the needs of law enforcement in terms of information collection, processing and sharing. While policing has always been a “knowledge intensive” activity, big data analytics make it possible to process vast amounts of data, fuse heterogeneous data sources and make sense of all this information for purposes of prediction (threat assessment), investigation and provision of evidence. The impact on civil liberties, and most particularly on privacy, increases as police refine its profiling techniques of potential criminals, victims and of the population at large. Big data analytics allow police to focus scrutiny both on particular individuals and on people who are not subject of criminal investigations with little or no human intervention. This first means that law enforcement becomes more interested in the pattern than in the substance. As a way of example, metadata becomes as (or more) relevant than the content of a communication. This also means that law enforcement increasingly relies on a logic that is inductive, big data being an empirical technique based on probabilities. All information becomes relevant to identify patterns of behaviour but most importantly, “for the suspect to emerge, everyone must be subject to surveillance” . The use by police of intelligence methods increases their powers and thus the risks of abuse of authority. This shift calls for appropriate counterweight and oversight. Traditional safeguards brought by the data protection framework that operate at the time of data collection such as data minimization and purpose specification – as currently designed- seem ill-suited to efficiently regulate these new policing practices. It becomes each time more difficult to restrain data collection based on a strict definition of the purpose of the processing (which tends to be broadened to give more flexibility to the data controller) and to exercise an effective control on secondary uses of the data. The presentation will discuss the limits and opportunities of the new provisions on purpose specification and use limitation enshrined in the Directive for data protection in the police and justice sector, on which the Council, The European Parliament and the European Commission reached an agreement on 15 December 2015.status: publishe