Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, has defended its record in using large datasets for criminal investigations while putting forward an ‘action plan’, seen by EURACTIV, to appease concerns raised over the agency’s ‘illegal’ data use by the EU’s data protection watchdog. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) slammed Europol in September after a probe had unearthed evidence of national law enforcement agencies increasingly transmitting ‘large datasets’ to Europol, as opposed to ‘targeted data’ proportionate to specific criminal investigations, thereby breaching standards set out in the 2016 Europol Regulation. Moreover, the EDPS had found that as part of the processing of such large datasets, the personal data of individuals who were not in any way connected to criminal activities was also going through Europol’s system.