March 10, 2021 · Blogs | EDRi-gram | Privacy and data protection | Biometrics | Cross border access to data | Data protection standards | Surveillance and data retention
Eurodac database repurposed to surveil migrants
Eurodac is the EU database used to store asylum seekers’ and refugees’ data, as well as certain categories of “irregular” migrants. By the end of 2019, the EU stored almost 6 million peoples’ fingerprint sets in the database. Research show how legislative developments transform the Eurodac database into “a powerful tool for mass surveillance”, endangering migrants' fundamental human rights.