All articles

epicenter.works defends civil liberties in the digital age, and is committed to a free and open internet. Our main goal is to uphold the fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of speech in the internet. All of our work is closely tied to the legislative process in the European Union and several member states. In our work, we combine detailed policy analysis with public campaigning and strategic litigation, which is consequently informed by the details of every dossier we work on, but also aims to inform and engage the general public in the political debate.

This is a guest post by Eduardo Santos of the Portuguese digital rights organisation D3 - Defesa dos Direitos Digitais. You can find the Portuguese version of this story on D3's website.

Three weeks ago we officially lodged a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority against the Passenger Name Record directive - we reported on it earlier this year. After only three weeks, we have now received the response from the data protection authority: The complaint was rejected. That sounds negative at first, but in reality it is good news. Now we can and must file the complaint with the Federal Administrative Court within four weeks. 

Together with our German partners from Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, we are currently fighting to stop the collection of airline passenger data in Europe. To this end we just filed seven complaints in Austria with the Data Protection Authority regarding the practice of processing passenger data by a designated unit in the Interior Ministry. Our aim is the legal evaluation of the underlying PNR law, which is based on the EU PNR Directive, in order to determine whether it is in line with the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection.