Thursday, November 04, 2010

EU to create 'right to be forgotten' online

Just days after U.S. voters threw overboard one of their top privacy advocates in Congress, the European Commission announced Thursday that it will push for creation of a Web users' "right to be forgotten."

The commission, which is the executive body of the European Union, plans to update 15-year-old laws governing collection and use of consumer information to reflect the age of Google and Facebook. Changes could come early next year.

"Strengthening individuals' rights so that the collection and use of personal data is limited to the minimum necessary," the commission said in a statement. "Individuals should also be clearly informed in a transparent way on how, why, by whom, and for how long their data is collected and used. People should be able to give their informed consent to the processing of their personal data, for example when surfing online, and should have the 'right to be forgotten' when their data is no longer needed or they want their data to be deleted."

Word comes as U.S. privacy advocates digest news that Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who last year introduced sweeping federal privacy legislation, lost his campaign for re-election on Tuesday night.

"I think that the demise of Boucher really is a setback to national privacy legislation," said U.S. privacy expert Larry Ponemon, head of The Ponemon Institute, which conducts privacy audits for U.S. firms. "I don't see anyone else pursuing this agenda in the next few years."
Read the rest here.

1 comment:

Visibilium said...

What they're saying in their jumbled Left-speak is that we have a property right in our personal data (Do-Not-Track) and telephonic reception (Do-Not-Call). I can dig it. In fact, I would go further by saying that the owners of such property are entitled to compensation for unauthorized use.

Once we recognize such rights and establish their parameters, the passage of byzantine privacy laws wouldn't be necessary. The Lefties will opt for the byzantine option, however, since the concept of property has such a bourgeois odour.