http://www.dw.de 6/15/15
Justice Ministers from all of the
EU-countries have agreed on the new data protection act, including the
so-called "right to be forgotten." Several large companies strongly
oppose the reform, European officials said.
The ministers hammered out the new
regulations, which would give more protection to Internet users in the whole of
the European Union, during their meet in Luxemburg on Monday.
Once the reform is finalized, the
social networks such as Facebook would have to ask their users for explicit
permission to process their data. In addition, the users would have the option
to transfer their data when switching to another social network.
The new rules would also allow
citizens easier access to institutions in charge of protecting their privacy
across Europe.
In the future, the companies working
with large amount of private data would not be able to hide in "the data
protection-oases," German justice minister Heiko Maas said at the
beginning of the Monday talks.
Disappearing from the Net
One of the big points for the EU
ministers is also the so-called "right to be forgotten," which allows
the EU citizens to ask for their private data to be deleted. The reform should
allow for online information, including pictures, to be removed, in case they
violate privacy or data protection laws.
The expected changes follow the last
year's decision by the EU's top court, which
required that search engines like Google remove links to personal information
that are "inadequate, irrelevant... or excessive."
Thousands of EU citizens have
already submitted requests for information to be deleted from public search
engines.
Complaints from tech giants
If the companies would fail to
comply with the upcoming regulation, they would be forced to pay fines reaching
two percent of their global revenue, according to the EU ministers. European
Parliament has requested even larger fines.
EU officials claim that the long
debate on the issue has seen fierce lobbying from large data processing
companies, who claim that reform could complicate the planned creation of a
single market for digital services.
The companies, including Amazon.com
Inc and German software giant SAP SE, also claim that the proposal would kill
Europe's cloud computing industry.
Update after two decades
The reform would replace the
guidelines agreed upon in 1995, at the time when less than one percent of
Europeans had Internet access. The arrival of the Internet age has forced the
individual members to regulate data protection on their own,
leading to varying degrees of protection across the EU.
The EU justice ministers are still
required to agree on a compromise with the European Parliament, where some MP's
call for even stricter regulations on privacy. At the earliest, the reform is
expected to be finalized by the end of this year.
It would then enter a transitional
period and come into power in 2018.
dj/jil
(dpa, Reuters, AFP)
US White
House asks Congress for new hacking protection laws
The US White
House has urged Congress to pass new cyber security rules after this week's
revelation by the US government that the personal data of millions of current
and former federal employees had been hacked. (06.06.2015)
Surveillance
and human rights in the digital age
Surveillance
technologies are increasingly being used in Latin America to monitor citizens.
Uruguayan transparency advocate Fabrizio Scrollini discusses what needs to be
done to protect human rights in the region. (27.04.2015)
When in
doubt, delete. That's the approach a member of a Google advisory group has said
should be taken when the company receives requests for data removal. But some
think the right to be forgotten should go further. (05.02.2015)
Opposition
blasts coalition data retention deal for Germany
The German
federal government agreed on new guidelines for data retention. In the future,
the connection data of telephone calls and online traffic should be kept up to
ten weeks. The opposition is outraged. (15.04.2015)
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