DutchNews.nl reports:
Amsterdam city council broke privacy rules when it analysed the Facebook connections of dozens of youth gang members, the NRC said at the weekend.
The council said it had hoped to identify ‘interesting types’ who had not yet been in the public eye and in so doing broke the law, the NRC said.
The paper earlier broke the story about the Facebook analyses but now says that documents obtained using freedom of information legislation show the city went too far.
Read more at DutchNews.nl.
Even reading the translation of the NRC report, I find myself somewhat confused as to what privacy laws were violated. It sounds like they were analyzing big data to find patterns, but I don’t see where they were using non-public data of any kind. So is it the case that the government cannot analyze publicly available profiles and data? If anyone would like to jump in with an analysis or explanation for those of us not expert in EU law, that would be great.