The EU Has Cut Red Tape for Finding Out Who You Are Online

Since 18 August 2026, the EU’s e-Evidence regulation provides a direct route for authorities to demand electronic evidence - YOUR PERSONAL DATA - from a provider thorough 26 of it's member states (Denmark does not participate).

The new standard deadline is ten days, with eight hours for legally defined emergencies.

Previously, it was up to 120 days for a European Investigation Order or an average of ten months for mutual legal assistance.

The fact, that your wording might be perfectly OK in Spain, doesn't mean it's OK in Sweden.

Germany, for example, criminalises insults under §185 with additional protection for politicians.

German police was seeking a Gab user’s identity over calling Ricarda Lang fat; Gab refused.

Now imagine you are halfway through writing something unpleasant about a politician.

You have the photograph, the quote and an observation which, in a normal adult conversation, would produce either laughter or someone telling you to fuck off.

Before posting, you might want to consider whether a public prosecutor from France might come up with a paragraph.

You might not be notified. You might not be invited to explain the joke. You might not even know there is a file. Your name might end in a specialized database, and could light up when you are asking for a credit, applying for a job, or generally seek to have a bank account.

An email address, however, is only the beginning of an interesting file.

Europol and the Commission’s Joint Research Centre have published a report on emerging privacy-enhancing technologies. Its annex summarises a telling limitation of e-Evidence: providers must possess the requested data, and the procedure does not solve encryption.

They discuss using AI for collecting evidence, predictive policing and surveillance, high-performance computing for decoding communications and supporting real-time surveillance alongside exploiting the information that remains available when messages are encrypted.

It also considers identifying anonymous social-media users through their writing patterns.

You bought the camera to watch your doorstep, the car to get to work and the phone to speak to your friends. Congratulations. You have crowdsourced the sensor network. It would be almost rude for the authorities not to use it.

Looking further ahead, the report describes potential radar-like sensing in 6G infrastructure. Its quantum-communications section recommends adoption by eligible, verified users while discussing the difficulty of maintaining user lists.

Consider banking. In June, Sparkasse Chemnitz refused to open an account for Martin Sellner. His attempt to obtain urgent court relief failed.

Sellner’s banking problems extend well beyond Austria or Germany.

The search for a stable account took him through Hungary, Poland, Malta and Georgia, while accounts in several other European countries also came and went.

Even basic banking access, he says, has involved repeated restrictions on incoming payments.

These may be banking decisions, perhaps not evidence of EU distributing a secret blacklist. They nevertheless illustrate how access to ordinary services can become entangled with political acceptability.

Martin Sellner is a useful example because the punishment does not need a sentence. He was investigated for years and, as even hostile Austrian coverage noted, had not been criminally convicted.

Convicted criminals can have bank accounts. Sellner, labeled "persona non grata", can't.

Washington, Beijing and Moscow hardly need European encouragement to recognise the usefulness of sophisticated investigative technology. The difference is that Europe does it while lecturing everyone else about free speech. In America, calling a politician fat is rude.

In Brussels, it is a start of a cross-border data workflow, a metadata opportunity and a future AI training set.