The privacy problems created by the Internet and other new technologies
such as RFID have an important place on the agenda of the European
institutions that seem to be more anxious than ever to tackle those
issues.
The hearing at the European Parliament's Civil Liberties
Committee reported in the last EDRi-gram seems to be only the top of
the iceberg.
Article 29 working party will discuss at the next
meeting, on 18 February 2008, the highly sensitive topic of privacy
& search engines, and it is probable to adopt an Opinion on this
topic.
But the views of the Working party's members are already
public, after the last month meeting at the European Parliament.
Moreover, Peter Schaar, Germany's Federal Data Protection Commissioner
and Chairman of the Article 29 working party, made some straightforward
comments to Financial Times, explaining that the cookie and search data
retention period is too long : "For me personally it still seems rather
long, and I could imagine I am not alone."
He underlined the fact
that IP addresses are considered as personal information according to
the EU legislation and dismissed security concerns as a reason to keep
data: "I cannot imagine that it is necessary to store data such as IP
addresses for security reasons. What is the security threat? Security
purposes don't justify the long-term storage of this data."
Other
national data protection agencies are looking into more privacy aspects
of computer usage. The Spanish Data Protection defined last year the
filtering of information for purposes other than virus and spam
protection as "not in conformity with Spanish law". Also Article 29
Working Party plans to investigate targeted advertising, which could
cause problems for Google or Yahoo.
The European Commission is
also working on a document on RFID policy, that will include the
privacy aspects, based on the discussions in the RFID working group. It
is not clear yet if the document will be a binding regulation or
recommendation.
EurActiv website points that the Commission
will publish, in the next weeks, a new EU survey that shows "an
overwhelming majority considers public awareness about privacy and data
management to be low, but at the same time almost 75% of respondents
say they are worried about leaving personal information on the
Internet."
Apparently the Commission expects these results and is
looking at increasing the funding for awareness-raising campaigns and
technologies which improve privacy protection.
