Germany's Constitutional Court on hessenDATA — Police Automated Data Analysis Struck Down for Lacking Statutory Limits

Hesse's police used the hessenDATA platform to merge and analyse stored data from many police databases; more than 2,000 officers ran about 14,000 queries a year. Hamburg's police law contained a comparable power. The Society for Civil Rights (GFF), with journalists, lawyers and activists, brought constitutional complaints against § 25a of the Hessian public security act (HSOG) and § 49 of the Hamburg police data processing act (HmbPolDVG).
In its judgment of 16 February 2023 (1 BvR 1547/19 and 1 BvR 2634/20) the Federal Constitutional Court held both provisions incompatible with the right to informational self-determination. It found that they allowed unlimited amounts of data to be processed with methods not circumscribed by law, including the creation of comprehensive profiles and the use of self-learning systems, without defining data types or a sufficiently high threshold. Such an intrusive analysis, the court held, requires at least a concretised danger to a significant legal interest.
Hamburg's provision was declared void immediately; Hesse was given until 30 September 2023 to enact a revised § 25a. The case is a cautionary precedent: the tool was in routine use before its legal basis was tested, and the evidence of its effectiveness was never the question the court answered. It is included for what it shows about statutory clarity, proportionality and independent review for public-sector analytics.

Read the full analysis: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2023/bvg23-018.html