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Deutsch: Lex Nokias Einzug ins Finnische Parlament

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Macedonian: Лекс Нокиа влегува во финскиот парла...

Government bill dubbed as Lex Nokia, also known as the snooping law, entered the Parliament for debate on 24 February 2009.

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Deutsch: Datenschutzbehörden unterstützen die Zivilgesellschaft beim Thema Te...

Macedonian: Органите за заштита на лични податоци ...

The Article 29 Working Group and the European Data Protection Supervisor have issued public statement supporting some of the arguments of the civil society, including EDRi, made in the recent open letter sent to the European Parliament on 17 February 2009 and in the campaign against "voluntary data retention".

The open letter underlines the signatories' concerns related

Dear Members of the European Parliament,

We welcome the various statements by the EU to incorporate citizen's interests within the policy-making process for the Internet and we would like to draw your attention to some serious concerns we have in respect to the Telecoms Package, which is about to enter the Second Reading stage in the European Parliament.

Our concerns relate to those amendments to the Telecoms Package which affect the Internet and Internet users.

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The report Surveillance: Citizens and the State recently issued by the House of Lords Constitution Committee supports privacy and considers executive and legal limits must be imposed to surveillance and data collection.

The report is a positive step in the promotion of individual freedom and liberty and offers some recommendations in this direction.

One of the recommendations, following a suggestion from the UK Computing Research Committee's, is that the encryption of personal data should be mandatory in some circumstances and that the Government should introduce appropriate regulations in this sense.

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After several years of discussions and debates with the EU bodies, the Framework Decision on the protection of personal data processed in the framework of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters was adopted by the Council and published in the Official Journal on 30 December 2008.

The decision is the first horizontal data protection instrument in the field of personal data used by police and judicial authorities and its main purpose is the establish a common level of privacy protection and a high level of security when exchanging personal data.

The European Parliament has already been consulted twice on data protection framework decision: once in September 2

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In October 2008, the 30th International Conference of Privacy and Data Protection Commissioners in Strassbourg adopted a resolution on the urgent need for protecting privacy in a borderless world, and for reaching a Joint Proposal for setting International Standards on Privacy and Personal Data Protection.

Following this resolution, the Spanish Data Protection Authority (DPA) - as the organiser of the 31st international DPA Conference to be held in November 2009 - has set up a working group on drafting this Joint Proposal. The first meeting of this working group was held on invitation of the Spanisch DPA and the DPA of Catalonia on 12 January in Barcelona.

Participant

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Will the 2008 be remembered as the Data Retention implementation year or the first Freedom not Fear day? As always with the conclusions, we might answer better this question in 2009 or 2018. But let's look at some facts from the last year now

One of the main hot privacy topics during 2008 was related to the implementation of the EU data retention Directive 2006/24/EC in several European countries. Despite the fact that data retention has been resisted in some countries in Europe, with 15 March 2009 as the final day for starting to retain Internet-related data, most of the EU member states adopted data retention laws only in 2008.