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

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."

11 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)

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    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: 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.

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

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

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    4. 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.

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    5. Re:Quelle surprise! by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Informative

      who would of guessed.

      In English we say "would have guessed".

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    6. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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

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  4. 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.

  5. 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