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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: Der Arbeitskreis Artikel 29 äußert sich zu Social Networking

Article 29 Working Party issued on 22 June 2009 an opinion on how European privacy laws affect social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspace.

The opinion states the social networking sites should be responsible for the compliance to European privacy laws and, on the other hand, that users of such sites should upload pictures or information about other individuals only with the consent of the respective individuals.

Presently, social networking users share pictures and tag friends' images without requiring a prior consent and generally, communicate publicly, placing their own and others' private informati

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Deutsch: Die Telekomminister lehnen das Telekompaket in der vom EP angenommenen...

The European Commission continues to pressure the Council and the new European Parliament to rapidly adopt the telecoms package without a proper scrutiny of the law or any consideration of the implications of Amendment 138.

At the Luxembourg meeting on 11 June 2009, the telecoms ministers decided to reject the telecom package in the form adopted by the European Parliament in the second reading on 6 May 2009, thus proposing a new round of negotiations.

The ministers consider the Parliament has breached the earlier compromise reached with the Council on the telecoms package as a whole, obviousl

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Deutsch: Europäisches Parlament schränkt Meldungen von Datenverstößen ein

The modification of the Privacy and Electronic Communication directive voted by the European Parliament (EP) on 6 May 2009, as part of second reading of the telecom package, limits the data breach notification only to the electronic communications service providers.

Initially, in its first reading of the telecom package last year, the European Parliament insisted to expand the data breach notification beyond the initial provision, to online services or even public administration. This idea was supported by privacy experts such as Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor who insisted to apply

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Deutsch: Europäische Kommission löst Expertengruppe für Datenschutz auf Macedonian: Европската комисија расформира група ...

The European Commission has decided to dismantle a group of experts that needed to review the European Data Protection Directive.

The group was formed after a tendering process and included: Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel for Google, David Hoffman, director of security policy and global privacy officer for Intel; Henriette Tielemans a privacy lawyer from a US law firm, Christopher Kuner, a privacy lawyer with another US law firm;

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Civil liberties groups La Quadrature du Net, European Digital Rights (EDRi), AK Vorrat, and Netzpolitik.org are urging the European Parliament to heed advice given by the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx and scrap plans dubbed "voluntary data retention".

"A proposal currently discussed in the European Parliament as part of the 'telecom package' would allow providers to collect a potentially unlimited amount of sensitive, confidential communications data including our telephone and e-mail contacts, the geographic position of our mobile phones and the websites we visit on the Internet", warns Patrick Breyer of German privacy watchdog AK Vorrat.

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The amendments adopted on 24 September 2008 by the European Parliament (EP) on the ePrivacy Directive includ the obligation of information society services providers to notify personal date related security breaches to the national authorities.

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On 30 September 2008, the Munich District Court decided in a provisional ruling that website operators were not violating the data protection legislation when storing IP addresses of their visitors as IP addresses alone are not considered personal data.

The case was brought to the court by an individual who argued that storing IP addresses in log files by a web publisher represents a privacy violation because the information could be used to identify him and relate his identity to his web surfing activity.