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Groups Accuse EU Parliament of "Caving In" To Pressure From Business and US

Posted by samzenpus on from the it-all-makes-perfect-sense-expressed-in-dollars-and-cents dept.

angry tapir writes "The European Parliament's industry committee has approved more than 900 amendments to proposed new data protection laws. Civil liberties groups and consumer organizations were quick to accuse members of the Parliament (MEPs) of caving in to pressure from big business and the U.S. 'The Conservative and Liberal parties in the Parliament have voted against the interests of European consumers, who expect MEPs to ensure existing E.U. data protection standards are not diluted,' said Monique Goyens, director general of the European consumer organization, BEUC."

38 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Quelle surprise! by Eunuchswear · · Score: 2

    Conservatives and liberals voting against the peoples interest - who would of guessed.

    (note for our American friends - liberal means center right here)

    --
    Watch this Heartland Institute video
    1. Re:Quelle surprise! by solidraven · · Score: 2

      No, liberal means people who are interested in business interests.

    2. Re:Quelle surprise! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      which tends to amount to the same thing.

    3. Re:Quelle surprise! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, liberal means people who are interested in business interests.

      I would say: no... but it's 50% yes and 50% no.
      Liberal in Europe and in US has a different meaning and the first statement is much more correct. For instance, in Italy the "Partito Liberale Italiano" was a center-right party.
      The point is that "liberalism" applied to economy is a center-right concept, while "liberalism" applied to "social matter" is a center-left concept.
      The difference at this point is easy: in EU we apply the meaning of "liberalism" to economic matters and US people apply this word to the social matters.

    4. Re:Quelle surprise! by jkflying · · Score: 2

      No, that's Fascist. In the US, both parties currently toe that line.

      --
      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
    5. Re:Quelle surprise! by Eunuchswear · · Score: 2

      Well, it depends what you mean by "here".

      I was refering to the article, where "Liberal" is a reference to the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe). This is grouping of European Cenre-right parties. (The lib-dems in the UK, MoDem in France...)

      If one read "here" as meaning "here in Europe" then "Liberal" would often be understood as "economicaly liberal", which is what you mean I guess.

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video
    6. Re:Quelle surprise! by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Informative

      who would of guessed.

      In English we say "would have guessed".

      --
      No sig today...
    7. Re:Quelle surprise! by jonbryce · · Score: 2

      Bear in mind that anyone in Europe who wanted to abolish state healthcare provision would be considered so extreme right wing that they would get less votes than the Monster Raving Looney Party. Actually they probably wouldn't get any votes at all, because they wouldn't be able to find the 10 or so people needed to nominate them on the ballot paper.

    8. Re:Quelle surprise! by maxadamo · · Score: 1

      (I am the same person who commented before)..... I don't know. In my opinion, after 1989 the situation is getting every day worse in the whole Europe and we're losing those rights that we had before. Nowadays, everybody, center-left and center-right politicians, tend to abolish "welfare" and "state healthcare". Only extreme left is trying to defend those rights.... and I belong to those "crazy" extreme-leftists. In Italy, before '90, we had things like "equo canone", and renting a house was really cheap, we had the "scala mobile" and salaries were growing with the cost of life, car insurance prices were controlled and they were very cheap.... we had, we had, we had.... now we have nothing and in the near future we'll have even less. Now they call it "modernity", but it really looks like something that we already had in the XIX century.....

    9. Re:Quelle surprise! by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      No, in English we say "would've guessed." Which is phonetically identical to "would of guessed."

      Even if that were true* it wouldn't make it OK to write "would of".

      [*] It isn't, 'would've', rhymes with 'love', not 'of'

      PS: You never heard anybody say "would have"? Where did you grow up?

      --
      No sig today...
    10. Re:Quelle surprise! by joocemann · · Score: 1

      I wish I could flag you as someone that will strongly defend bad ideas.

      A flag that would prevent me from seeing this crap.

      Country bumpkin is not a valid dialect.

    11. Re:Quelle surprise! by maxadamo · · Score: 1

      How dare you criticize your lords and masters, who are so much better than you? You must accept those sacrifice for the good of yoorop. Bend over, spread open your anus and think of the glory of yoorop! /s

      I am not criticizing my masters, I am criticizing those servants who do not have a class consciousness. Therefore, as I have class consciousness, I pay attention and take my anus very tight.

    12. Re:Quelle surprise! by maxadamo · · Score: 1

      mhh... now I understand what "yoorop" is... you were sarcastic :)

    13. Re:Quelle surprise! by khallow · · Score: 1

      Only extreme left is trying to defend those rights.... and I belong to those "crazy" extreme-leftists. In Italy, before '90, we had things like "equo canone", and renting a house was really cheap, we had the "scala mobile" and salaries were growing with the cost of life, car insurance prices were controlled and they were very cheap.... we had, we had, we had.... now we have nothing

      Your country squandered its wealth for a few decades, and that came back to bite you. Such an amazing coincidence.

      Now they call it "modernity", but it really looks like something that we already had in the XIX century.....

      I think people who worry about things reverting to the 19th century should be solidly in the "conservative" camp. You're about as liberal as the horse and carriage at this point.

    14. Re:Quelle surprise! by Kjella · · Score: 1

      The point is that "liberalism" applied to economy is a center-right concept, while "liberalism" applied to "social matter" is a center-left concept.

      At least here in Norway I'd disagree, the left is into high taxes, many government services and little economic freedom as well as trying to curb anything they consider harmful or unhealthy activities so little social freedom as well. They want to both provide for you and protect you from yourself. Here I'd say both kinds of liberals are to the right of that, but it's not the "same" right as they disagree almost as much with each other as they do with the left.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    15. Re:Quelle surprise! by gmanterry · · Score: 1

      The point is that "liberalism" applied to economy is a center-right concept, while "liberalism" applied to "social matter" is a center-left concept.

      At least here in Norway I'd disagree, the left is into high taxes, many government services and little economic freedom as well as trying to curb anything they consider harmful or unhealthy activities so little social freedom as well. They want to both provide for you and protect you from yourself. Here I'd say both kinds of liberals are to the right of that, but it's not the "same" right as they disagree almost as much with each other as they do with the left.

      That describes perfectly what is happening in the U.S.

      --
      Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
    16. Re:Quelle surprise! by DRJlaw · · Score: 1

      [*] It isn't, 'would've', rhymes with 'love', not 'of'

      PS: You never heard anybody say "would have"? Where did you grow up?

      In the same land as Merriam-Webster, apparently.

      love (\'l[schwa]v\)
      of (\[schwa]v; especially before a consonant -.[schwa]... when emphatic, as when it is the last or the first word in a sentence, |[schwa]v...\)

      Phonetically identical '[schwa]v' where [schwa] is the printed upside-down e that Slashdot cannot reproduce properly from Unicode.

      You've never heard anybody say "would've"?
      You grew up where everyone primarily says "would have"?
      I sincerely doubt it, since I've never heard "you never heard" without either "have" or the "'ve" contraction from people who actually use "have" in that manner.

    17. Re:Quelle surprise! by DRJlaw · · Score: 1

      Both of us would SOUND the same, but in English we would type "would've guessed"

      Speaking up so it's better understood why some people type "would of" instead of "would've".

      Such as the original poster, who was really obviously not American, and quite likely French (hence, the title of this part of the comments).

      If you are conversational but not fluent, it's very easy to screw up the written grammar with a bad rendition of the phoneme.

    18. Re:Quelle surprise! by manu0601 · · Score: 1

      (I am the same person who commented before)..... I don't know. In my opinion, after 1989 the situation is getting every day worse in the whole Europe and we're losing those rights that we had before. Nowadays, everybody, center-left and center-right politicians, tend to abolish "welfare" and "state healthcare".

      Our political elite are for the most utterly contaminated with neoliberalism thinking. And after three decade most people now can see neoliberalism means povery for them, our political elite are now mostly disconnected from the population. See how absention, far right and radical left are raising in Greece, Spain, Portugal, France and Spain.

    19. Re:Quelle surprise! by Schmorgluck · · Score: 1

      I think you're wrong, this is typically the kind of error that someone to whom English is not the primary language would most likely NOT do. At least not someone who'd have learned it at school, and who has the grammar more formally in mind when writing it. Since "of" doesn't make any kind of grammatical sense at that place (you can't just replace on a whim an auxiliary verb with a preposition), this mistake is more likely to come from someone who spoke English before learning to write it.

      Plus, the OP didn't put a space before the exclamation point, which is the rule in French. While admittedly non-conclusive, it hints towards that person not being French.

      --
      There's nothing like $HOME
  2. Relevant amendments: by a_hanso · · Score: 1

    "text that would allow companies that control data and third parties to process personal data without informing consumers, on grounds of "legitimate interest""

    "The definition of personal data has also been narrowed to exclude 'pseudonymous data' and suggested safeguards were ignored. This is risky because such data can easily be associated to individuals"

    So they don't always have to tell you they're collecting personal info and once your name, phone number, profile picture and other identifying data is stripped, they can do whatever they want with your data?

    1. Re:Relevant amendments: by Neil_Brown · · Score: 1

      once your name, phone number, profile picture and other identifying data is stripped, they can do whatever they want with your data?

      If all other identifying data has been stripped away, it is really "your" data any longer?

      I'm not sure that the situation you describe here would protect the data under the existing rules either:

      (a) 'personal data' shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity;

      I think there is a difference between the situation which you describe (which seems to be anonymous data) and pseudonymous data, though, in that pseudonymous data does not have all identifying data stripped out, but rather replaced by a less obvious identifier.

      The phone number 07700 900771 might become a2t6#g1, but, if, in a stream / sequence of data, that number always becomes that alternative descriptor, anyone in control of the algorithm / key could convert obtain the original number again with relative easy — just run all possible permutations of the phone number (which is of standard form, with specified structure) through the algorithm and pattern match.

      To my mind, provided that the algorithm doing the conversion is appropriately protected, pseudonymisation may be one good method of reducing the risk associated with the processing of personal data, protecting it in the event for a data breach, and thus be a form of security measure, but is unlikely to stop the data from being capable of identifying the individual, in the hands of the party carrying out the pseudonymisation.

    2. Re:Relevant amendments: by c0lo · · Score: 5, Informative

      >

      To my mind, provided that the algorithm doing the conversion is appropriately protected, pseudonymisation may be one good method of reducing the risk associated with the processing of personal data, protecting it in the event for a data breach, and thus be a form of security measure, but is unlikely to stop the data from being capable of identifying the individual, in the hands of the party carrying out the pseudonymisation.

      With all respect, your mind and common sense are superseded by better minds:

      Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets

      Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary’s background knowledge.
      We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information

      Deanonymizing Mobility Traces: Using Social Networks as a Side-Channel

      Location-based services, which employ data from smartphones, vehicles, etc., are growing in popularity. To reduce the threat that shared location data poses to a user’s privacy, some services anonymize or obfuscate this data. In this paper, we show these methods can be effectively defeated: a set of location traces can be deanonymized given an easily obtained social network graph.

      I know... series (scroll to the bottom of the page)

      A LOT About Your Web Browser and Computer
      The Country, Town, and City You Are Connecting From (IP Geolocation)
      What Websites You Are Logged-In To (Login-Detection via CSRF)
      I Know Your Name, and Probably a Whole Lot More (Deanonymization via Likejacking, Followjacking, etc.)
      Who You Work For
      Your [Corporate] Email Address, and more

      De-anonymizing social networks

      Network de-anonymization task is of multifold significance, with user profile enrichment as one of its most promising applications. After the deanonymization and alignment, we can aggregate and enrich user profile information from different online networking services and make the bundled profiles available for end-users as well as third-party applications.

      Actually you know what? lmgtfy

      --
      Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
    3. Re:Relevant amendments: by MurukeshM · · Score: 1

      They then decide to store all of these things, because if doing any of A, B, C, ... is legal, surely doing all of A, B, C, ... has to be legal.

      Reminds me of a French movie about euthanasia, in which the protagonist gets euthanized by having a ton of people do minor, innocent acts which cumulatively euthanize (murder) him. But isn't that argument incomplete in its specification? Doing any A is legal if B isn't done, B is legal if A isn't done, etc.? So doing both A and B is illegal...

    4. Re:Relevant amendments: by cryptolemur · · Score: 1

      So they don't always have to tell you they're collecting personal info and once your name, phone number, profile picture and other identifying data is stripped, they can do whatever they want with your data?

      Well no -- if it's for example medical or health care research, then you do have to get explicit, specific, informed concent that can be withdrawn at any time...
      There has to be some limits in a civilized society, you know!

    5. Re:Relevant amendments: by Forty+Two+Tenfold · · Score: 1

      once your name, phone number, profile picture and other identifying data is stripped, they can do whatever they want with your data?

      If all other identifying data has been stripped away, it is really "your" data any longer?

      Yes. Read up on "plagiarism" and "copyright". Sheesh!

      --
      Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
    6. Re:Relevant amendments: by Dodgy+G33za · · Score: 1

      There are times when you would like mod points to go beyond +5

    7. Re:Relevant amendments: by Neil_Brown · · Score: 1

      Great links — thank you!

  3. why not... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    vote green!

  4. Remember.. by crossmr · · Score: 1

    When the same group made such a big deal out of killing ACTA? dog and pony show to make it look like they cared so they could turn around and do this.

  5. This makes me sick by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    _US_ corporations lobbying in the _EU_ -- Disgusting.

    Hopefully there'll be a marked drop of Amazon and Ebay customers in the EU after this.

  6. Re:How dare they by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think you're vastly missing the point.

    I don't use facebook, or any social network for that matter. Why should this company have access to my personal data through other avenues?

    That is the sort of thing these amendments allow. Perhaps you should RTFA before you chime in with your ill-informed opinion in future.

  7. Should've failed by Hentes · · Score: 1

    Keep legislation out of the net.

    1. Re:Should've failed by Eunuchswear · · Score: 1

      The net - Somalia for the 21st century.

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video
  8. Act NOW! by I)_MaLaClYpSe_(I · · Score: 5, Informative
    We need to act now on this!

    privacycampaign.eu

    This data protection directive is probably the most serious and important thing for net politics ever. It will very much determine the direction of the world, data protection wise. Not only for the EU, but the world and not only for the next 15-20 years but probably forever.

    If we now manage to get a strong data protection law in the EU, US companies will have to learn to deal with it and will have far less problems with data protection consumer rights in the US as well.

    A strong data protection law builds the basis for fighting all other laws that endanger freedom and privacy. Be it SOPA, PIPA, CETA, ACTA or TPP like treaties, be it CISPA and cybercrime laws, be it a PATRIOT act, forward data retention, 6 strikes, you name it. A strong data protection law is the basis to fight all these Very Bad Things(tm) and if we don't get the momentum in the civil society to stand up now and fight for the right for privacy, all will be lost.

    Europeans: keep wirting your MEPs within the next two months. Call them and send them FAX letters. Make sure they know that civil society will rise if they screw it up, like we did with ACTA.

    Here you can phone your MEPs for free! Prepare yourself to go onto the streets again.

    Time schedule:

    • 20. February 2013: Vote in ITRE
    • 21. Februar 2013: Vote in EMPL
    • 18. - 19. MÃrz 2013: Vote in JURI
    • 24. - 25. April 2013: Vote in LIBE
  9. Pathetic ... by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    "The definition of personal data has also been narrowed to exclude 'pseudonymous data' and suggested safeguards were ignored. This is risky because such data can easily be associated to individuals," she continued.

    This amendment seems similar to a Yahoo position document, leaked on Wednesday, in which the U.S. tech giant recommends supplementing "the definition of personal data in the draft regulation by adding a distinct subset of data considered pseudonymous, which will trigger differential obligations."

    Meanwhile a new website, LobbyPlag.eu, compares amendments put forward by MEPs with the text submitted by lobbyists for Amazon, eBay and the American Chamber of Commerce. Civil liberties activists are angry that European parliamentarians seem to have copied many amendments from these submissions.

    So we're letting the companies who have most of our personal information rewrite the rules on how it's treated.

    This is the fox guarding the hen house, and giving those entities any say into the law makes it toothless.

    Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. What a joke -- welcome to the oligarchy kids, because we're stuck with it.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  10. Re:Act NOW! by I)_MaLaClYpSe_(I · · Score: 1

    Here is what La Quadrature du Net has to say about it: Citizens' Privacy Jeopardized in EU Parliament Committees Again

  11. Only way to fix this is catch them one at a by ralphaostrander · · Score: 1

    Time and burn them at the stake.