US Activists Oppose US Govt Calls To Weaken EU Privacy Rules

judgecorp writes "The European Commission has proposals for data privacy (including the 'right to be forgotten') and the U.S. government is opposing them. Now U.S. activists have arrived in Brussels to lobby against their government's opposition to the European measures. The move comes following reports of 'extreme' lobbying by U.S. authorities against the European proposals." Although the "right to be forgotten" raises some free speech issues, it doesn't seem like a bad idea in principle.

Comments

Re:Fortunately

[MightyMartian]

The fear the US may have is that at some point down the road the EU may try to go after US companies to force them to obey its rules. It's one thing to say "Facebook.de must delete every evidence of a user's existence upon their request", but what happens if the EU is trying to say "Facebook.com must delete every evidence of a user's existence upon their request."

Beyond that, there are some limits to how far you could ever apply this "forget me" notion. I'm sitting in North America, running a listserv that has people from the US, Canada, Europe, a couple of Asian countries and Australia on it. The listserv has an archive dating back to about 2002 and there are copies of that archive all over the bloody place. If I suddenly were faced with requests from my European users to start deleting every post they made, it would be an arduous and ultimate futile process. We'd be talking about deleting not only their posts, but posts that contain excerpts from their posts. Worst of all, it would ruin the continuity of the archive, which may be of significant value (I've found myself going back several years to hunt down information).

Obviously this law is targeted at Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. But what it ultimately comes to encompass is ludicrous, and I sure hope that the US, where my stuff is based, does not go down such an extremist road.

Re:Not a pretty sight

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you feel the same way about Piers Morgan advocating against our Second Amendment? He is not a U.S. citizen and he has no vote here. He may not be threatening extreme violence or such, but he is sticking his nose in where it doesn't belong.

You silly nincompoop, can't you even see the difference between a government sticking its nose where it doesn't belong, and a guy (a journalist) expressing his opinion ?

As an EU person

[zennyboy]

I've seen more good rulings come out of EU than the US. With no in-depth information on a subject, I would more trust the EU with my person (/personal information) than the US (Government/US companies)...

Re:Not a pretty sight

[Tokolosh]

As the OP I am now forced to explain that I was being facetious. If you didn't get it, then I pity you.

Nevertheless, there is a serious intent in highlighting that Americans seem to feel it is their god-given right to tell others how to run their business. This used to be great when Americans still believed in their own Bill of Rights and felt that the rest of the world would benefit from the same. But now they have been turned into sniveling cowards by a bunch of barbarians, they are happy to trample anything that sticks up.