Olga Cronin

Olga Cronin

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Biography
Recent media

Olga Cronin is a Senior Policy Officer of Enforce and the coordinator of the International Network of Civil Liberties Organisations (INCLO). She is focused on facial recognition technology, encryption, state surveillance, privacy and data protection.

Twitter @OlgaCronin
Contact: olga.cronin@iccl.ie

Olga Cronin
Biography

Olga worked as a journalist for almost 15 years. She leads ICCL’s work on police use of facial recognition technology. Her work to date, with academics and other NGOs, helped prevent use of the powerful mass surveillance without pre-legislative scrutiny or debate.

She also leads ICCL’s work on several EU proposals, including the EU ‘ChatControl’ proposal which could mandate unprecedented mass surveillance of all public and private digital communications. Her work revealed that Irish police unlawfully retain files on innocent people wrongly flagged by error-prone image scanning technology as suspect sharers of child sex abuse materials. She is leading several complaints to the Data Protection Commission.

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Olga Cronin
Sample of media mentions (last updated October 2023)

  • Technology is set to be used to crackdown on shoplifting in the UK (Newstalk, October 2023)

  • KPMG found there was no legal basis for public services card database (The Irish Examiner, June 2023)

  • Facial-recognition technology will turn gardaí into roaming surveillance units (The Irish Times, April 2023)

  • Gardaí defend policy of keeping data of cleared people (RTE, October 2022)

  • Gardaí retaining data of people cleared of child sex abuse suspicion ‘without legal basis’ (Irish Legal News, October 2022)

  • An Post subsidiary GeoDirectory faces complaint from civil liberties council (The Irish Times, May 2022)

  • Civil liberties group concerned about use of An Post staff to collect data (The Irish Times, May 2022)

  • An Post accused of selling economic and marital information of householders to private entities (The Irish Examiner, May 2022)

  • An Post declines to reveal nature or source of personal information sales (The Irish Examiner, May 2022)

  • Should employers be given access to their employee vaccination status (Newstalk, January 2022)

  • Vaccine passport system is unproven in its benefits and discriminatory in its effects (The Irish Times, November 2021)

  • Just 6% of positive cases being notified to Covid tracker app (The Irish Examiner, October 2021)

  • Olga Cronin: Tracker app is a giant leap for transparency, but beware its privacy implications (The Irish Examiner, July 2020)