In March 2020, Frank van der Linde entered the immigration line for citizens of the European Union at the Schiphol International Airport of Amsterdam. Linde, a Dutch lawyer for citizen and human rights, returned from outside the EU, and the immigration officer asked him a series of questions about his journey. Linde thought it was a random investigation; After a few minutes he was cleaned for access. But unaware of Linde, his answers were recorded and shared with a Dutch prosecutor who gathered information about Linde’s movements.

The officer is that day about Linde’s arrival of the arrival of a seemingly innocent action that occurs when you are after a flight to the United States, much of Europe and increasingly all over the world – the exchange of detailed personal Information about each traveler between airlines and governments. The data, which has been retained over you for years, is increasingly valuable for technology companies that experiment with the use of algorithms that can decide who is allowed to cross international boundaries.

Linde, which is publicly outspoken about homeless rights, anti-racism and pacifism, was first secretly marked by Dutch police in 2017 as a person of interest among an Amsterdam municipality counter-terrorism program. In July 2018, Linde had a ‘strange feeling’ that he was being monitored; In the end, he would sue the government more than 250 times under the freedom of information laws to expose the extent of the supervision. Although Linde was removed from the city’s waiting list in 2019, which later received a personal excuse from the mayor of Amsterdam, the investigation continued. When Linde learned that the police placed his name on an international travel warning, he wondered if they also used his travel data to locate him.

In October 2022, Linde requested his flight records of the government. The data, called a passenger name record (PNR), is a digital trace of information related to an aviation ticket purchase. PNR records are sent to the destination country by most commercial airlines, about 48 to 72 hours before departure. Although PNR records seem innocent, it contains highly sensitive personal information, including the traveler address, cellphone number, date of flight discussion, where the ticket was purchased, credit card and other payment information, billing address, luggage information, regular fly information, information, general Remarks related to the passenger, the date of intended travel, full itinerary, names of accompanying travelers, travel agency information, historical changes to the ticket, and more.

In December 2022, more than two years after Linde passed through Schiphol, the Dutch PNR office, a passenger information unit, handed 17 travel records to Linde. They said that they did not share his information with others, but that Linde was suspicious. He appealed quickly. In March 2023, the Dutch government acknowledged that they had in fact shared Linde’s PNR details with the border police three times, including before the flight in March 2020, when the immigration officer was instructed to withdraw information. (They also shared an additional seven flight records that they claim to have only discovered on a second search.)

While Linde revised his PNR records, he was surprised to see that some of the travel data the government had on him were wrong – some flights were missing, and in four cases the government had records of flights he never did not take. For example, one PNR record of 2021 said that Linde traveled to Belfast, Northern Endeland; Linde says he reserved the ticket, but changed his plans and never got on the plane on board. “What do businesses do with the data?” Linde asks as he scrolls through copies of the PNR records on his laptop. “If commercial businesses help to analyze wrong data, you can draw all kinds of conclusions.”