Timeline for What do border officials do with my passport when I tell them that I'm entering as the spouse of an EU national?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
20 events
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| Nov 29 at 14:22 | comment | added | Relaxed | In particular, the CNIL was fine with repurposing data collected during criminal investigations for completely different purposes (background checks). That's a common pattern and I would be very surprised if the EU Commission gets involved or the EUCJ ever creates strict rules on that. | |
| Nov 29 at 14:22 | comment | added | Relaxed | Just to mention a recent example, the CNIL recently issued a decision on some French police files and merely complained about lack of information and outdated data, no objection in principle to the open-ended collection of extensive data covering people who have not been found guilty of anything, even witnesses. What's the “task” here beyond facilitating unspecified future investigations? | |
| Nov 29 at 14:17 | comment | added | Relaxed | @Tor-EinarJarnbjo Yes, that's explicitly the case for the EES, I covered that in my answer as well and I mostly expect anything done at the EU level to have a similarly well defined scope. But I don't think this notion of task places any serious restriction on national law enforcement. | |
| Nov 29 at 14:06 | comment | added | Tor-Einar Jarnbjo | @Peteris Did you intentionally leave out the rest of the section you are linking to? 'The Cabinet shall determine the amount of the information to be included in the aforementioned system, the procedures for using it and the time periods for the storage thereof.' I don't speak Latvian and am not able to find the details of what is stored and what not. The law, if read fully and not only cherry-picked fragments, is not conclusive. | |
| Nov 29 at 14:03 | comment | added | Tor-Einar Jarnbjo | @Relaxed Exactly. Authorities may collect data if it is necessary for a 'task carried out ...', note the task. Authorities may collect data if it is necessary to do a specific job and not just on a 'nice to have' basis. The task requiring data to be stored in the EES is to keep track of how long persons have stayed in the Schengen area and since this task is only relevant for a certain set of persons, not all border crossings will be stored. | |
| Nov 29 at 0:42 | comment | added | Paŭlo Ebermann | "the only complete record of your entries or exits are the stamps in your passport (if any)" – given that often there are no stamps, this means there is no complete record? | |
| Nov 28 at 23:02 | comment | added | Relaxed | Some countries are more comfortable with this type of open-ended surveillance than others but the GDPR is deliberately written not to interfere with it and when the authorities are intent on doing it, it doesn't provide much leverage to oppose it. | |
| Nov 28 at 23:00 | comment | added | Relaxed | @Tor-EinarJarnbjo We might wish it would be so but it's hard to see it as a blatant violation of EU data protection law. As a matter of fact, there is already some pretty extensive data collection through API systems. Not only does the GDPR allow it (“task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority”), it also gives cover for private businesses to assist (“necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject”). There is also very little enforcement or push back from national DPOs or the EDPB. | |
| Nov 28 at 21:04 | comment | added | Peteris | @Tor-EinarJarnbjo no, it is not a violation of EU data protection laws; GDPR allows for national law asserting a state security interest. E.g. Latvian law likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/… section 10.13 states "The information regarding the persons crossing the external border and travel documents thereof, as well as the vehicles driven by the persons when crossing the external border of the Republic of Latvia and documents of such vehicles shall be registered by the State Border Guard in the State information system." and it is done thus. | |
| Nov 28 at 15:44 | comment | added | Tor-Einar Jarnbjo | @Peteris If a nation records all border crossings in a national database, it would be a blatant violation of EU data protection laws. A government is not arbitrarily allowed to track a person's movements. For the same reason, also in the upcoming EES system, border crossings are only registered if it is necessary to keep a record of the time a person has spent in the Schengen area. The EES will contain no records of border crossings e.g. by EU/EEA citizens, residence permit holders or to a certain extent family members of EU/EEA citizens. | |
| Nov 28 at 11:23 | history | edited | jcaron | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Nov 28 at 10:34 | comment | added | Peteris | "the only records of entries or exits are the stamps in your passport (if any)" is technically not true - while the only Schengen-wide records are like that, many (most? all? I'm not sure, but definitely many) nations do record all the border crossings in their national records with great detail, which will also include the identification document data. | |
| Nov 28 at 10:14 | vote | accept | user49357 | ||
| Nov 27 at 19:09 | history | edited | lambshaanxy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Nov 27 at 14:24 | comment | added | Relaxed | @phoog That's a complex question, I tend to agree but I didn't mean to comment on the baseline level of accuracy. What I had in mind are evaluations from the NIST, especially NISTIR 8280 that suggest really breathtaking differences in the level of performance of these systems across demographics. | |
| Nov 27 at 14:15 | comment | added | phoog | @Relaxed all of the facial recognition mistaken identity cases I've read about were ludicrous and involved police officers "trusting the system" when the two people (and the images of those people) clearly bore little resemblance to one another. Of course, "media accounts of facial recognition failures" is rather the opposite of an unbiased sample, but it certainly leaves me with the impression that people are far better than facial recognition, perhaps excluding instances where the person is disguised and the computer can identify the facial geometry anyway. | |
| Nov 27 at 13:40 | history | edited | jcaron | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Nov 27 at 13:32 | comment | added | Relaxed | Some precision on the use of VIS: It could certainly be used to direct questioning and double-check some things but it doesn't record a whole lot of information on the application and that's not what's being retrieved first (cf. Schengen Borders code or VIS regulation). The main purpose is to prevent people from using someone else's passport, which is entirely possible when the passport is not biometric (rarer but still possible). People (very much including border guards) and even facial recognition systems (!) are quite bad at recognizing people from other ethnicities. | |
| Nov 27 at 13:21 | comment | added | Relaxed | There is nothing in the Schengen acquis preventing countries from maintaining national systems recording additional information. The Schengen Borders code also provides for several other database lookups, including Interpol and national databases of stolen documents and national and Interpol databases to ascertain a person is not a threat to public policy, internal security, public health or international relations. Similarly, the SIS lookup will include a check against a list of stolen or invalid documents (and not only alerts on persons). | |
| Nov 27 at 12:34 | history | answered | jcaron | CC BY-SA 4.0 |