Brussels and the European Union: European companies using services from U.S. Internet companies must now be concerned about whether they are in breach of EU Data Protection laws. Those laws require companies to ensure only authorized personnel have access to any personal information of individuals. The fact that U.S. government agencies may be accessing this data could result in many European organizations being unable to satisfy their data protection obligations. The European Union has struggled to assert its citizens’ rights to privacy in the United States for almost a decade.Transatlantic agreements on sharing the financial and travel data of European citizens have taken years to complete, and the European Union is now trying to modernise an almost 20-year-old privacy law to strengthen Europeans’ rights. Fears about the security of data held on U.S. servers have already been a major factor in slow European adoption of “cloud” computing services, in which computing-intensive applications are done by central providers in large server farms. “You hear more concerns in Europe than in the US, about the Patriot Act in particular. PRISM just enhances those concerns,” said Mark Watts, a partner in London law firm Bristows specialising in privacy and data compliance. “The main players that are mentioned are much more on the consumer cloud end… but it may be that emotionally it adds to the concerns about US cloud providers,” said Watts, whose clients include several large US internet firms. The EU said Friday that US Attorney General Eric Holder had agreed to share information about Washington’s huge Internet spy programme after Brussels expressed concerns about the privacy of European citizens.Holder meanwhile said that US authorities had full oversight over the so-called PRISM programme, even through the US was easily undermined by contract worker, Edward Snowden. The talks came just days after the EU demanded answers from Holder and warned of a “grave” threat to the rights of European citizens from the intelligence programme. EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding and Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem said the EU and US had agreed to set up a group of experts to exchange information and look at better safeguards. Reding said the US attorney general had addressed their fears of “big brother intrusion on privacy”.“I welcome Attorney General Holder’s proposal to convene, in the short-term, a meeting of experts from the US and from the EU in order to clarify together the remaining matters — and I think there are remaining matters,” Reding said. “There are still questions to be answered. European Justice Commissioner and Vice President Viviane Reding said: “This case shows that a clear legal framework for the protection of personal data is not a luxury or constraint but a fundamental right.” Reding, who has been trying to push through an update to Europe’s data protection laws for 18 months, noted that EU government leaders meeting in the European Council had been able to agree the Data Retention Directive relatively quickly. Their action on the 2006 directive, which stipulates that phone and internet companies must store records to help in fighting serious crime, showed they could act fast when limiting civil liberties. “It is time for the Council to prove it can act with the same speed and determination on a file which strengthens such rights,” she said in an emailed statement.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 17:03:52 +0000
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