In March 2020, Frank van der Linde entered the immigration line for EU citizens at Amsterdam Schiphol International Airport. Linde, a Dutch citizen and human rights defender, was returning home from outside the EU when the immigration officer asked him a series of questions about his trip. Lind thought it was a random check. After a few minutes, he was cleared to enter. But unbeknownst to Linde, his answers were recorded and shared with a Dutch public prosecutor who was collecting information on Linde’s movements.
to the officer about Linde’s arrival that day through a seemingly innocuous act that occurs any time you board a flight to the United States, most of Europe, and increasingly anywhere in the world—the exchange of detailed personal information about Any passenger between airlines. And the data governments keep on you for years is invaluable to tech companies experimenting with algorithms that can decide who is allowed to cross international borders.
Linde, who is outspoken about homeless rights, anti-racism and pacifism, was first secretly identified as a person of interest by Dutch police in 2017 under Amsterdam’s municipal anti-terrorism program. In July 2018, Linde had a “weird feeling” that he was being watched. He eventually sued the government more than 250 times under Freedom of Information laws to reveal the extent of the surveillance. Although Linde was removed from the city’s watch list in 2019, investigations continued later with a personal apology from Amsterdam’s mayor. When Lind learned that police had put his name on an international travel alert, he wondered if they were also using his travel data to track him down.
In October 2022, Linde requested his flight records from the government. This data, called a passenger name record (PNR), is a digital sequence of information related to the purchase of an airline ticket. PNR records are sent by most commercial airlines about 48-72 hours before the flight to the destination country. While PNR records may seem innocuous, they contain highly sensitive personal information, including the passenger’s address, mobile phone number, flight reservation date, ticket purchase location, credit card and other payment information, billing address, baggage information, Information on frequent flights. , general points related to the passenger, desired travel date, complete travel schedule, names of accompanying passengers, travel agency information, ticket date changes, etc.
In December 2022, more than two years after Linde passed through Schiphol, the Dutch PNR office, called the Passenger Information Unit, handed over 17 travel documents to Linde. They claimed they did not share his data with others, but Linde was suspicious. He quickly appealed. In March 2023, the Dutch government admitted that it had in fact shared Linde’s PNR details with border police on three occasions, including before the March 2020 flight, when an immigration officer was ordered to secretly extract the information. (They also shared seven additional flight records they claimed to have discovered only in the second search.)
When Lind checked his PNR records, he was surprised to find that some of the travel data the government had on him was incorrect—some flights were missing, and in four cases, the government had records of flights He never left. For example, a PNR record from 2021 stated that Lind traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland. Linde says he booked the ticket, but changed his plans and never got on the plane. “What do companies do with data?” Linde asked as she browsed copies of PNR records on her laptop. If commercial companies help analyze the wrong data, you can draw all kinds of conclusions.
