Smart­phone Data Ex­trac­tion in the Con­text of Asylum

De­vel­op­ment sum­mary

Víctor Her­ra­iz Jager­ovic’s art­icle fo­cuses on smart­phone data ex­trac­tion (SDE) by the German Fed­er­al Office for Mi­gra­tion and Refugees (BAMF) in asylum pro­ceed­ings. It ex­am­ines the prac­tice of asking the asylum seeker to sign a con­sent form before ex­trac­tion, the en­hanced duty to co­oper­ate under the new Asylum Pro­ced­ure Reg­u­la­tion, and the GDPR re­quire­ment that con­sent be freely given, spe­cif­ic, in­formed and un­am­bigu­ous; the art­icle con­cludes that the “freely given” con­di­tion is not met, so the prac­tice is un­law­ful if con­sent is used as the legal basis.