Between operational requirements and the desire for national digital sovereignty – The debate on the regulation of the platformization of Germany’s police

• In Event: Digital Criminology: Privatisation and Commercialisation

Abstract

The utilization of data integration and analysis platforms by the German police has seen a notable increase in recent years, with the platforms of the US company Palantir Technologies being a prominent example. The German police have expressed interest in these platforms for two main reasons. Firstly, the increasing volume of data that needs to be processed, and secondly, the distribution of this data across various sources. This strong operational desire is politically counteracted by the wish for national digital sovereignty, which implies that domestic companies should provide the appropriate technical tools wherever possible. However, such tools are not yet market ready. Against this background, there is political debate in Germany about what type of platforms the police should use and how this can best be regulated. This also includes considerations that the state should develop its own tools – which, given the technical complexity of the platforms, could raise further (security) problems. This paper will present the salient debate on the regulation of police platformization in Germany and introduce a taxonomy that differentiates the various proposals regarding the allocation of control over the platforms, thereby implying novel constellations for the amalgamation of public and private technologies. Additionally, it is argued that this dynamic will be further accentuated with the advent of generative AI and the provision of options, as exemplified by Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which empowers law enforcement agencies to engineer generative AI instruments autonomously.

Author

• Simon Egbert, Bielefeld University