This isn't the one-stop EU data protection you're looking for “Nothing is agreed, until everything is agreed.” So said EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova on Friday announcing a partial agreement on the proposed new Data Protection Regulation. Clear? It gets worse. Jourova announced that Europe’s data protection ministers had agreed on a so-called “one-stop-shop” mechanism for dealing …
> Maybe they finally recognized that the entire Internet would have to block European traffic if they did not allow personal data to be collected.
No, there would be no such requirement or limitation.
> After all it's the fuel that Internet websites run on and it's the price you pay to use things like Gmail or Google Search.
True, and they'd be able to carry on collecting and using that data.
What would, if proper laws got passed, happen is that companies would have to be open and honest about what they collect and how they use it. Just burying a one liner "we will collect personal data and use it to provide services from us and 3rd parties" somewhere in a "War and Peace" user agreement doesn't cut it. What they'd need to do is provide a clear, simple, statement of what they collect and what they'll use that data for.
Many people, for example, may well be happy if Google tell them "we'll collect everything we can from reading your mail, provide personalised advertising based on that data, but we won't pass that data on to anyone else" in return for providing the "free" Gmail service. But most of those people probably wouldn't be happy with a "we will collect any information we can, including personal information such as sexual preferences and medical issues, and sell that data to anyone who'll pay us for it" !
What many companies want to be able to do is the latter without having to admit to doing it - eg by taking the users failure to set an obscure setting in their browser as "permission" to collect any information possible and use it in any way.
This exercise was *supposed* to be about preventing one country deliberately setting it's privacy/data protection laws to "relaxed" so as to entice the likes of Farcebook and Gobble. That leads to "brass plate" headquartering in the way large corporations do in order to (legally it must be pointed out) reduce their tax bill.
It was also supposed to be about making it easier for a citizen in one country (eg the UK) dealing with a corporate based in another country (eg Ireland) when they have an "issue". That seems to have been hashed up so as to produce something worse than we currently have.
Announce a broad, all-encompassing law, and then immediately start poking holes in it to take into account everything and the kitchen sink.
Instead of analyzing the issue thoroughly before providing a review of possibilities to be approved at national level in order to proceed with caution and not leave open the possibility of saddling a solution with a cargo of exceptions.
But I believe the latter requires actual work, whereas the former only needs lobbying.
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