The first section provides an overview of the general legal approach to privacy protection in the context of crime prevention on a constitutional and statutory level. This is followed by a study of the means used by European national regimes to balance privacy and crime-prevention interests, in both the public and the private sectors. Various international efforts to address this issue are then described and critiqued. The author advises that the efforts of various European legal systems to resolve conflicts between crime-prevention techniques and privacy interests vary significantly and in some cases are insufficient. He argues that to achieve an equal level of privacy protection in cooperative policing efforts among European countries, an international common approach to the problem is necessary. Regarding this goal, the Committee of Ministers adopted the Recommendation No. R(87)15, Regulating the Use of Personal Data in the Police Sector. It contains guidelines on gathering, storing, linking, and transmitting personal information for police activities. 60 footnotes