We hear most often about the surveillance by security services of the U.S. but also European states need to get information about what criminal organisations and terrorists plan and who participate in them. On the other hand the total surveillance state raises justified suspicions, in particular in post-communist countries. Moreover, information does not always come from direct surveillance by the state, government agencies would also like to have access to the most possible data collected and stored by private actors for their own purposes. Although processing of data for prevention and fighting crime does not belong under the general Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), neither under the e-privacy directive, the collection of data by private organisations does. On Wednesday the 15 th January the opinion of the advocate general of the European Court of Justice (ECoJ) was published in three such cases (joint cases C-511/18 and C-512/18, C-623/17 and C-520/18). A French, a British an...