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Deutsch: Britisches Innenministerium tritt vom Projekt zur Abhörung von Anschl...

<--- Text clarified on 20.11.2009--->

The Home Office's plan (known as the Interception Modernisation Programme) to put under surveillance everyone's email, mobile phone, text and Internet communications has been put on hold, following the outcomes of a consultation launched in April 2009.

At the beginning of the year, the Home Office had already given up its plans to build a central database with all information on who communicates on phone, email and Internet to whom, where, how and when.

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Deutsch: Deklaration über globale Datenschutzstandards

The public voice coalition, where EDRi is also a member, gathered almost two hundred privacy experts, advocates, and governments officials from around the world for a civil society event in Madrid with the title "Global privacy standards for a Global world".

Held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Privacy and Data Protection Commissioners, the event was cybercasted, live blogged and tweted in order to be available to any Internet user interested in the privacy topics.

The conference had 5 different sessions, with two keynote speakers - Mr. Stavros Lambrinidis, Vice President, European Parliament and Mr.

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Deutsch: Dritte PrivacyOS-Veranstaltung: Mehr Datenschutz, erhöhtes Bewusstsei...

Continuing the privacy events after the huge success of the 11th Austrian Big Brother Awards that took place in the evening of 25 October 2009, the Third PrivacyOS Conference took place in Vienna on 26-27 October 2009, focusing on sharing information and best practices among experts in the field, but also on raising awareness in privacy.

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Deutsch: EU-US: Gemeinsame Grundsätzen zu Datenschutz und Datenverbreitung

After three years of working together, the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State and the experts from the EU Presidency and Commission have recently issued a statement establishing a set of common principles to protect the personal data exchanged for law enforcement and security purposes.

Based on these common principles, a binding international EU-U.S. agreement will be negotiated based on these common principles "to facilitate further cooperation while ensuring the availability of full protection for our citizens," as expressed by the Department of Homeland Security.

U.S.

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Deutsch: Frankreich verwirft die Einführung des EDVIGE-Projekts

The French Government produced two new decrees published in the Official Journal on 18 October 2009 which actually resurrect the rejected EDVIGE plan to create an intelligence database with personal data.

By-passing the French Parliament, the Minister of Interior Brice Hortefeux introduced the two new decrees by practically splitting the former EDVIGE decree which was withdrawn by the Government at the end of 2008, thus creating two clones of the rejected project, as EDRi-member IRIS (Imaginons un réseau Internet solidaire) explains.

One of the texts is meant as a tool for the police to prevent harm to public safe

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Zusatz 138 – EP soll zwischen Demokratie und Niederlage ...

The opening meeting of the informal conciliation discussions between the Council and European Parliament (EP) has taken place. This process was largely brought about by the Parliament's overwhelming rejection of a "compromise" proposal with regard to the famous "amendment 138" text in May of this year.

The Council of Ministers' current proposal is for the Parliament to unconditionally overturn its current position and accept the text that it previously rejected.

As a result, the debate has become wider than "simply" the wording of one paragraph of a piece of telecoms legislation.

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Deutsch: Koalition der Zivilgesellschaft diskutiert globale Standards im Datens...

The Public Voice, the largest worldwide civil society coalition where EDRi is a an active member, will discuss "Global Privacy Standards in a Global World" during its conference on 3 November 2009 in Madrid, Spain, to be held in conjunction with the 31st Annual International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners.

Prominent advocates and experts from the academic, consumer, digital rights and labor communities will discuss with public officials and the business sector how to raise privacy awareness in the global community and how to promote civil society participation in decision

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Deutsch: EESC-Stellungnahme über den Einfluß von Social Networking-Seiten auf...

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) debated in a meeting organized on 17 September 2009 a new approach in regulating social networing websites, with the appointment of an EU Ombudsman to be responsible for the protection of human dignity, privacy and data protection in the audiovisual sector, that should include specific responsibility for social networking websites. The final opinion would be made public in the beginning of November 2009.

But this new approach by the EESC needs to be in line with other EU developments in the field of regulating social networks.