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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.

The base rate fallacy is the tendency to ignore base rates in the presence of specific, individuating information. Rather than integrating general information and statistics with information about an individual case, the mind tends to ignore the former and focus on the latter. This phenomenon is widespread – and it afflicts even trained statisticians, notes American-Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He illustrates this common reasoning flaw early in the book with the following example. Kahneman writes:

Shortly after the EU gave a green light to upload filters, two laws were proposed in Austria - each with the alleged goal of tackling online hate speech - that rang the alarm bells.