The European Parliament deems the sharing of passenger name records (PNR) initiative between the US and the EU as “intrusive”.
The date, personal information such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, travel itineraries and billing information for all passengers entering and leaving the EU including. The Commission wants to form an agreement with the US to share this data to help combat terrorism. However the European Parliament is against this and wants the Commission to prove storage of this data is helpful.
In a statement the Euorpean Parliament said: “Personal data protection has been a difficult area for EU-US relations recently, as in the case of the agreement on banking data transfers (Swift report). A general EU-US data protection agreement is now under discussion, as is a new agreement on the sharing of passenger flight data. Parliament will have a right of veto on both accords.
“MEPs stressed that PNR data should in no circumstances be used for data mining or profiling.
“MEPs reiterate their call to the Commission to provide factual evidence that the collection, storage and processing of PNR data is necessary” in this respect. They also call on the Commission to “explore less intrusive alternatives”.