Europol

The EDPS's executive summary of its inspection of Europol, with fieldwork on 2 and 3 July 2025, says that at the time of the inspection the old and the newer facial recognition solutions were used in parallel, and that Europol still had to migrate a sizeable number of images to the new system; the summary does not name the products. It found that the newer system still always returns 50 candidates despite a recommendation to add a matching threshold or ranking cap, that its logs did not record matching scores or the order of candidates, and that Europol could not show a log trail for deleting facial images after retention periods expired. The EDPS's prior consultation opinion of 20 December 2023 concerns a facial recognition solution provided by NEC, which Europol bought after market research in 2021, and lists among its documents one titled 'NEC NeoFace Watch – Data Protection & NEC algorithm Equitability'. The opinion says Europol developed its own system, FACE, in 2016, and recommended an evaluation after six months to set matching thresholds, and further evidence of the algorithm's accuracy on children under 12. Solomon (12 November 2025), in an investigation also published by Computer Weekly, reports that Europol signed a contract with NEC in October 2024 and decided to exclude data of children under 12; Computer Weekly reports that Europol confirmed the software is used within a specific child sexual exploitation unit by trained expert staff. Neither EDPS document gives a start date for operational use.