More European citizens filed complaints of alleged data-violations last year compared to 2024, amid allegations the EU’s police agency Europol developed an intelligence tool to bypass EU laws.
“We have about 25 percent more complaints that are admissible [in] comparison to 2024 – so this part of activity starts to be very resource-consuming and starts to direct our main road in supervision,” said Wojciech Wiewiórowski on Thursday (7 May).
Wiewiórowski is the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), an independent authority tasked to ensure the EU institutions respect privacy rights when processing personal data.
His comments followed a presentation of the EDPS annual report for 2025, which highlighted the agency’s work on Artificial Intelligence, as well as an ever increasing workload and demands for legislative consultations.
The report also reflected on the past year having “the highest number so far” of requests for access to documents, suggesting a greater concern among citizens about possible unjust retention of their data.
And it also drew caution against the “first EU agreement to entail the large-scale sharing of personal data” with an outside country, namely the United States.
The deal foresees an exchange of EU data with US authorities for the small compensation of a continued visa-waiver scheme amid warnings it could lead to entry bans for critics of Trump.
Pressed on recent revelations by British, Greek and German media that allege Europol had created a surveillance intelligence tool, Wiewiórowski said that his agency is “missing the right tool box of actions that we can take in such situations.”
Gaia Neiman