By George Aine
European countries have begun using smartphone data to deport thousands of migrants back to their countries in Africa and Asia.
Europe is currently grappling with a migrant crisis, with thousands streaming into the different countries on a daily basis. As European Union is currently re-working its migration policy to bring immigration numbers down, it has merged that many countries are relying on mobile phone surveillance to trace the homes of different migrants back home and deport them.
The countries realized that thousands of migrants use smartphones to stay in touch with their families back home or with people smugglers. With Facebook and WhatsApp, the migrants are able to receive warnings on border closures by police, policy changes or scams to watch out for.
And it is this information that EU security agencies are using to deport them. When law enforcement agencies receive immigrants, they extract information from their smartphones’ messages, location history, and even WhatsApp data.
With this information, they trace the migrants’ home countries and take them back. Over the six months after Germany’s phone search law came into force, immigration officials searched 8,000 phones. If they doubted an asylum seeker’s story, they would extract their phone’s metadata – digital information that can reveal the user’s language settings and the locations where they made calls or took pictures.
To do this, German authorities are using a computer programme, called Atos, that combines technology made by two mobile forensic companies – T3K and MSAB. It takes just a few minutes to download metadata. Last year, more than 7,000 people were deported from Germany.
Denmark is taking this a step further, by asking migrants for their Facebook passwords. Refugee groups note how the platform is being used more and more to verify an asylum seeker’s identity. UK and Norway have been searching for asylum seekers’ devices for years.
However, rights groups and opposition parties have questioned whether these searches are constitutional, raising concerns over their infringement of privacy and the effect of searching migrants like criminals.
In 2017, both Germany and Denmark expanded laws that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum seekers’ phones.
