Panoptykon Foundation have received the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the Media Democracy Fund’s grant for investigation of the implications of algorithmically driven categorization and resource distribution to Poland’s 1.8 million unemployed citizens.

In October 2015 we published a report on “Profiling the Unemployed in Poland: Social and Political Implications of Algorithmic Decision Making”.

European Digital Rights (EDRi), Foundation for Information Policy Research (fipr) and Panoptykon Foundation provided comments on selected key elements to the Law Enforcement Data Protection Directive. In the analysis, we focus on the most problematic points of the Directive regarding: transferring data to third countries, sharing data for law enforcement purposes and the risk of violating human rights.

EDRi, Panoptykon Foundation and Access expressed their concern regarding the proposed Directive on EU Passenger Name Record. In current form, the proposal poses the risk of discrimination e.g. on religious grounds. Moreover, the proposal will bring significant costs to Member states. And all these with lack of evidence that such measures are effective in prevention of serious crimes.

With almost two million requests for telecommunication data and more than two thousand requests for Internet data concerning Polish citizens in 2015, it is clear that the access to metadata in Poland by the country’s secret services is still out of control.