Examination of Witnesses (Questions 194-199)
22 MARCH 2007
MR JOAQUIN
BAYO DELGADO
AND MR
HIELKE HIJMANS
Q194 Chairman:
Welcome, Mr Bayo Delgado and Mr Hijmans. Thank you very much indeed
for coming to give evidence to us. We are on the record now but
if at any point you want to go off the record, as indeed we did
in the last session, you are very welcome to. As you know, we
are conducting an inquiry into the Passenger Name Record and I
propose to give half an hour to this subject. I will try and preserve
order but with this very lively Committee it is quite difficult
but, nevertheless, I will try to do it. I wonder whether very
briefly you would like to introduce yourselves. Before you do,
can I ask you to convey our greetings to Peter Hustinx who has
given evidence to us in the past and has been a good friend of
this Committee.
Mr Bayo Delgado: I will. Thank you for inviting
EDPS to give evidence. I am Deputy EDPS and I am pleased to be
here. Mr Hijmans is one of our legal advisers in the office and
he is a specialist in the two areas on which you want evidence
about, so we thought it would be a good thing to have him here.
For certain detailed or technical aspects he can be of help to
all of you.
Q195 Chairman: I should have said,
we would like to thank you very much for the very helpful written
evidence which you have given us on both subjects. Perhaps I could
open on PNR. In these negotiations there are likely to be requests
by the United States for more data elements to be made available.
You and the Article 29 Committee have said that the 25 elements
in the Agreement with Canada should be enough. Can you say which
of the existing 34 data elements you think should and could be
removed?
Mr Bayo Delgado: You can imagine that we could
discuss specific elements but I would like to focus on the main
element, which is indeed an item that is not in the Canada Agreement
and has a lot of meaningful aspects. This is specifically the
item labelled, "general remarks" which, in fact, is
an open text. In the negotiations this gave a lot of problems
to the European data protection authorities because this open
text allows any type of comment.
Q196 Chairman: Can you give us some
examples?
Mr Bayo Delgado: For example, if in this open
text it says a specific food, halal food, or any comment which
the person who is introducing the record thinks is relevant, it
can really touch on what are defined in the Directive as sensitive
data and this is quite a concern for the European data protection
authorities.
Q197 Chairman: It is described as
general elements, is it?
Mr Hijmans: It is good to know that this PNR
data has everything you would register when you book a flight,
either with a travel agency or through the internet, so everything
you put on your special wishes on your flight can be kept.
Q198 Chairman: They are described
as what, as general elements?
Mr Bayo Delgado: As general remarks.
Mr Hijmans: There are two others items which,
in fact, have the same effect in that they are not just a yes
or no but they give the client as well as the travel agency the
possibility to add something.
Mr Bayo Delgado: A whole system of filtering
that data was put in place because, of course, you have to avoid
too wide access to this sensitive data, but you could imagine
that the filtering of those data is very difficult because you
never know what will be there, so filtering open text is difficult.
This is special and meaningful too in the context of the so-called
pull system. You know that the American authorities pull the data,
the data are not being pushed by companies to the United States,
so that means the filtering aspect is also important. In fact,
in the Joint Review of the Agreement, the only one which has been
done, this was an issue which was analysed quite a lot to make
sure that this filtering was taking place in an effective way.
Q199 Baroness D'Souza: Would you
agree that the more information which is collected and recorded
the easier it would become in time to eliminate certain people
and, therefore, make it easier for travellers generally, but particularly
business travellers?
Mr Bayo Delgado: No, certainly not. To be very
precise, no, because I think this reasoning is contrary to all
data protection principles. If you have got a huge amount of data,
then the risk of inaccuracies, the risk of others matching this
data which has been introduced is very problematic. Of course,
a huge amount of data is not needed for the purpose of what it
is required, so to my mind this would be excessive. Of course
you can also look at what has been called the "positive profiling",
that would be people who are profiled positively, because they
do not represent a security risk. However, things are not so easy
because, first of all, this type of positive profiling means,
in fact, that you have got the risk of identity thefts and you
would have to produce a system also to make sure that those who
are positively profiled are the people they are supposed to be.
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